According to a SAMHSA (U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration) two percent of the population has misused prescription drugs over the past ten years. Prescription painkillers trail only marijuana in abuse rates, report shows, in the United States. Over the last decade, prescription drug abuse hit epidemic proportions, and though recently the rate of misuse has remained more constant, it is still too high.

“Any time you have 2 percent of the population using medications like this there is a lot to do, but we are doing a lot with a combination of putting tighter controls on who can get these drugs and public education,” said Peter Delany, director of SAMHSA’s Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and Quality, reports the Health Day Reporter.

Weight loss surgery is starting to become a common way for obese people in the United States to losing weight. According to the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery, about two obese people opt for a weight loss surgery in a year, which costs about twenty thousand dollars each. Per a study conducted on the success rate of this surgery, after six years following the surgery, about seventy five percent of the people who went through a gastric bypass had succeeded in losing and not regaining at least twenty percent of their weight before the surgery. The long term benefits of the surgery, however, have been questioned by some researchers.

According to a new study, a strong relationship has been found between weight loss surgery and alcohol or drug abuse. In the study, 132 females and 23 males who recently had a weight-loss surgery like a gastric bypass were given questionnaires to answer about their use of addictive substances post the surgery. It was found that the use of illegal substances increased not just at the time of the surgery, but also after one, three, six and twenty four months after the surgery.

Dr. Alexis Conason, who is a researcher at the New York Obesity Nutrition Research Centre in New York City, was one of the researchers in this study. As per his statements, the results of this study do not necessarily show that everyone who goes through a gastric bypass becomes an alcohol addict. This is because the study only shows an increase in the rate of alcohol or drug intake, but not necessarily to the extent that one becomes addicted to it.  Thus, one should not shy away from getting the surgery done just because of the fear of getting addicted to alcohol or drugs. He however mentioned that after this surgery, the patient should become cautious and notice the changes if any in terms of their alcohol or drugs requirement. They should be aware of the symptoms of substance abuse

Since it is now a widely accepted fact that substance abuse is growing at an exponential rate in the United States, more and more studies are now being conducted in order to estimate the extent of the problem, and its various other qualities like which substance is abused the most, gender ratio of substance abuse, at what age are people most susceptible to substance abuse, harmful effects etc.

One such study was conducted recently, in which Dr. Joseph W Frank from Brigham and Women’s hospital in Boston. He was the lead author and his work is available in the archives of Internal Medicine.

Prescription drug abuse has been a growing problem in the United States, and is fuelled not just by the carelessness of the patients, but also by the easy access that they have to these drugs due to the negligence of physicians as well as pharmacists. According to the statistics revealed in a survey by the Bureau of Justice in 1997, drugs were used in 70 percent of the state prisons and 57 percent of the federal prisons before imprisonment.

It was also observed that almost 50 percent of the teenagers arrested in the state and federal prisons were found to be under the addiction of drugs.