Here is some scary information: one in five teens in high school have taken a prescription medication they didn’t get from a doctor. This means narcotics or stimulants for you newbies out there and they are getting it from their friends or from the streets. The CDC survey of 16,000 students found that it was the 12th graders abusing it the most and whites abused these pills more than blacks and hispanics. I cannot tell you how much narcotic abuse I am seeing nowadays. It has made me so suspicious. I recently have seen a few different patients who I would have never suspected of “using” but they fessed up and it shot me for a loop. This is bad stuff but we physicians need to be very prudent in our prescriptions of these drugs. Get narcotic agreements. Urine test your pain medication patients regularly. We don’t want to deny people who really need these meds but this stuff is leaking into our community like a sieve.
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