Pain Killer Addiction

Pain killer addictions have become an all too common addiction among people in our society. Being addicted to pain killers does not necessarily mean that you are a drug addict. The all-too-common story of the events that tend to occur while leading up to a pain killer addiction, usually will sound something like this: A normal, everyday businessman unfortunately is involved in a car accident, suffering an injury. Or, you are coming down the stairs in your home when you accidentally trip on one of your children’s toys and fracture your foot. Or, you simply strain a muscle while playing with your kids, or playing golf. Any of these examples, or other situation a person may find themselves in which result in some sort of injury, end up landing you at the doctor, where they will most likely prescribe you a prescription painkiller to ease the pain
Now of course there is nothing wrong with taking a prescription written by your doctor. But where the problems begin to arise, is when you find yourself taking exceedingly higher doses of the pain killers than you were in the beginning, and taking them weeks, even months after the original injury occurred. This is where the pain killer addiction begins to set in, and you and your body are too used to relying on the pain killers to subdue the pain and discomfort.

It would now seem that the medication given to help you through your period of pain and discomfort is now the medication that may actually be causing further pain, discomfort, and a pain killer addiction. The pain from the incident that resulted in your injury or the fear of receiving further painful medical treatment is now accompanied by the more pain and discomfort from the symptoms of withdrawal, caused by the pain killer addiction. Rather than the pain killers easing your pain as it did right after your accident, you feel that it is now causing your body to experience heightened levels of pain. It has been noted that patients, who reported an original pain level of about two or three on the pain scale immediately following their incident, will after about one year of a pain killer addiction, report pain levels of around an eight or a nine.

The problems with pain killer addictions occur because the body becomes dependant on the effects of the pain killer, the same as it would with any other drug. Studies done on pain killer addictions have reported that every year approximately two million Americans are prescribed the use of pain killers, which are in the family of opioids, and in some of these communities in America, the abuse of painkillers, resulting in a pain killer addiction, has bypassed the addictions of cocaine and marijuana. The 2002 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (NHSDA) revealed that around 9% of the American population has used prescription pain relievers without a prescription at some point in their lifetime. These studies also indicated that approximately 1.6 million Americans, who used prescription pain relievers without a prescription, did so for the first time in 1998. This percentage estimation shows that there was a considerable increase in the use of prescription pain killers and pain killer addiction, since the 1980s, when it was reported that approximately 500,000 or less people were considered to be new individuals with pain killer addictions yearly.

Many drug rehabilitation centers treat pain killer addiction much the same as any other drug addiction. A pain killer addiction to the pain killer Oxycontin is very similar to that of a heroin addiction, as Oxycontin is sometimes referred to as “prescription heroin”. Pain killer addictions are serious addictions, and should not be overlooked simply because they are prescribed by a doctor, and legal to take. When the individual’s doctor stops prescribing the pain medication to them, many, who have acquired a pain killer addiction will attempt to obtain the drug from other sources, such as dealers on the streets, which then makes taking the pain killer illegal, and confirms a pain killer addiction.