Xanax Informative Speech

When you think of drug overdose, what do you think about? You probably said Cocaine or Heroin, but what if I told you that there was another drug killing hundreds of thousands of people every year and was somehow going unnoticed. I implore you to read on if you haven’t heard of the shadow epidemic that’s taking American lives everyday. That epidemic is Xanax. Xanax is a very commonly prescribed anti-anxiety drug which became popular in the early 2000s and only continues to rise in popularity as it becomes more of a mainstream recreational drug. Since it is the 8th most prescribed drug in the United States, it can be found in the homes of millions of U.S. families, Xanax is a dangerous, addictive, and easy to obtain drug that is not to be taken

One danger for addicts abusing this prescription drug is when a doctor refuses to write a prescription. This forces the individual to buy his or her drug of choice from an independent and unreliable seller. Fentanyl pressed “Xanax” are the most popular version of fake Xanax which, as said earlier, are extremely dangerous and easy to overdose on. About fifty percent of all overdoses involve Xanax or some form of benzodiazepine, while about 30% of all lethal overdoses involve benzodiazepines (Storrs). The death rate from benzodiazepines has more than quadrupled from 1998 to 2013 (Storrs). Now, anti-anxiety drugs like Xanax account for half of all overdoses nationwide (Mellor). Xanax abuse is part of whatIt is often called the shadow epidemic, because the general public mainly focuses on drugs like heroin, cocaine and opiods. This centralized focus on only a couple types of dangerous drugs gives a sort of tunnel vision effect, blinding people from seeing or caring about “better” drugs like

(Story of an Addict: The Struggle with Xanax Addiction)

By reading this statement, one can see that he needed Xanax along with painkillers to feel the same as when he started, only taking one per day. Mental Addiction had set in. Not only is mental addiction an issue, there is physical, or bodily, addiction to fear too. Physical addiction happens when someone can no longer function efficiently without the substance they have been using (Is Xanax Addictive?). Dr. Martin Doot, chief of addiction medicine at Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge gave a statement for an article on Xanax addiction, he said,

“About 10 to 20 percent of our patients are addicted to benzodiazepines alone or in combination with other compounds, usually alcohol or illicit drugs,” (Kotulak). This number has continued to rise to unprecedented heights since this statement was made in