Prescription sharing among loved ones growing into national problem
December 25, 2006

WASHINGTON - Not back-alley drug dealers.

Not Internet pharmacies.

Not doctors.

It's your Aunt Betsy.

Friends and family are becoming key suppliers of prescription drugs to
patients, say government officials, who are preparing major educational
campaigns to stem what they call a significant problem.

Officials say the sharing of the prescription drugs, which are
painkillers and stimulants, have the potential for bad drug
interactions and abuse by patients.

What has shaken up drug education officials at the White House Office
of National Drug Control Policy and the Substance Abuse and Mental
Health Services Administration are the little-publicized findings of a
nationwide report issued this year.

The National Survey on Drug Use and Health report showed that nearly 60
percent of 67,500 respondents over a one-year period, ending in 2005,
said they got their most recent prescription medication from friends or
family. Most of the recipients were young people, officials said.

"There's a culture of dosing going on - people looking for the
magic pills," David Murray, chief scientist at the White House
office, said in a recent interview. "We need to change the culture of
acceptability of mixing and matching. It's a little bit of a
stunner."

"We talk about Oxycontin abuse and Mexican gangs dealing drugs, but
we don't mention family or friends," Murray said.

Physicians, pharmacists and drug educators say there are endless tales
across the American landscape about people complaining of pain or
illness and, instead of visiting a doctor, relying on medication from
personal acquaintances.

"People do share their medication," said Daniel Zlott, a San
Francisco-based pharmacist and a spokesman for the American
Pharmaceutical Association. "They have some leftover medication for a
neighbor who has a lower-back problem, and Advil just isn't doing it.
They say, 'Oh, I'm sick. I remember my brother had something.' "

Zlott said he knows of several instances in which patients relied on
prescription drugs from family members and the results were nearly
tragic. The medication reacted with other drugs they were taking, he
said.

Pharmaceutical abuse has been a growing problem in recent years,
particularly among the young.

According to a Department of Health and Human Services survey on drug
use and health in 2005, 32.7 million people - or 13.4 percent of the
population - used prescription pain relievers nonmedically at least
once in their lifetime. Hundreds of thousands of people ended up going
to hospital emergency rooms because of overdoses and related problems,
officials said.

Pain relievers are the most commonly abused drugs, among them Vicodin,
Percocet and Oxycontin. They represent 75 percent of drugs used for
nonmedical purposes for the past year.

Many of the methods for illicitly obtaining prescription drugs have
been well documented and the target of intensive investigations. They
include doctor shopping, in which patients go from physician to
physician to obtain drugs; online pharmacies; theft; burglary; and drug
dealing.

But the latest surveys show that those problems pale in comparison to
people improperly obtaining drugs from family or friends, Substance
Abuse and Mental Health Services officials said.

H. Westley Clark, director of the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment
at the services agency, said officials are trying to determine the
"magnitude of the problem" related to prescription drug sharing -
in some cases, stealing - among family and friends.

... I'm outgrowing my birthday suit.