Prescription Drug Abuse

One of the things hospital security gets to deal with is prescription drug abuse. Whether it's someone altering scripts at our pharmacy or throwing a tantrum in the ED because the doc won't give them a script, it's a regular ordeal. We work with law enforcement on many of these issues and plenty of people go on to get prosecuted.

I've been thinking about it lately, though, and earlier today I asked myself, "What benefit does prosecuting and locking up prescription drug abusers provide society?" Seriously. I want to know what benefit I'm getting out of my tax dollars being spent this way because I'm struggling to come up with anything. If someone gets high and drives, causing a wreck, we have laws for that. If someone gets high and neglects or abuses their kids, we have laws for that.

So, why exactly do we care if someone want to sit at home and pop a bunch of Hydrocodone? I don't endorse it, but, frankly if someone wants to make that choice I'm not sure why tax dollars should be spent to stop it. Why can't doctors and pharmacists and local support groups and families handle this? Victimless crimes like this seem to me to be a poor thing for the government to regulate and enforce. We have laws in place to deal with it if other people are harmed, so that seems to me to be more than adequate. Certainly bad things happen now when they are illegal so I don't see how keeping them illegal makes things any better.

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The Talk

I don't get why it's so hard for parents to talk to their kids about sex. Okay, I get that it's hard, but isn't it better than the alternative?

The girls know to be wary of strangers on the Internet—but they’re also wary of how the web is affecting the boys they might actually want to date.

“Guys wouldn’t really know about that much stuff if it weren’t for the Internet,” Kelsey says. “It freaks them out.”

“Yeah,” Alexa agrees. “It makes them kind of, like, inappropriate.”

“It can make them perverts at a younger age.”

“Like, sometimes you’re not ready for stuff like that.”

I've talked with my daughters about sex and I intend to keep talking about it. Sure, it's awkward, especially for them; but I'll be damned if I'm going to avoid the topic so that they end up going elsewhere to learn. It's not as if silence from me is going to keep them "pure" and in the dark about the subject. They will "learn" about it from peers, TV shows, movies, the Internet, books, or whatever. Some of the info might be accurate, but much of it probably won't be. How can we expect our children to make good decisions then? It's hard enough to do when you have the right information let alone when you have misinformation.