Informative Essay On Pain Medication Abuse

American families have become more dependent on pain medications than ever before, and their healthcare practitioners need to ensure the safeness of such medications. It is guaranteed that some types of pain medications exist in your medicine cabinet. With a readily available supply of pain medications, it has brought up problems associated with the abuse of such medications that have led many negligent families into trading away their health for comfort. Pain medications are administered in a variety of settings, from nurses at hospital wards to paramedics at vehicle collision scenes. Pain medication is a broad term as it varies from over-the-counter strength to prescription strength. Each type of medication will have different active ingredients,

These drugs can relieve pain, and also put the users in a happy and altered state, which can be addicting for some. For example, MS Contin, which contains morphine, “is a strong opiate and is highly addictive” (Effects of Morphine). The outcome of abusing MS Contin includes: “unconsciousness, cardiac arrest, suffocation due to lack of breathing and coma, even death” (Effects of Morphine). When abusing such drugs, it will not only decline your general health, but can also be a permanent damage to your body. To reverse such mistake, patients will need to seek costly treatments; otherwise their livers can fail and be required to receive a lifetime treatment at a liver dialysis center. In efforts to reduce drug abuse, the Controlled Substances Act was signed into place, which created the drug schedules. There are currently five drug schedules, in which the “Schedule I drugs are considered the most dangerous class of drugs with a high potential for abuse and...Schedule V drugs [represent] the least potential for abuse” (DEA). The drug schedules outline how a healthcare provider can make such drugs available to patients, with the exception of Schedule I drugs, which are prohibited for medical uses. It gives both the users and healthcare practitioners a general idea of how dangerous the drug will be once the drug sorted into one of the five schedules. This allows patients to make informed decisions and think twice before using highly addictive narcotics for recreational