America’s Addiction: Prescription Drugs - Rebroadcast

Prescription medicine is a $320 billion industry in the US.  Nearly 4 billion prescriptions are written every year to Americans for classes of drugs ranging from oncology to antidepressants.  But this rapid growth of prescription medications has begun to show some negative effects on our society.  And those effects are addiction and abuse.  Prescription drugs now kill more Americans than cocaine and heroin combined. 

In this episode we discuss some of the trends have emerged around prescription drug abuse.  We talk about the categories of prescription drugs most often abused, data around that abuse and possible solutions to the epidemic that range from education to monitoring.