Our help line has been fully operational for the last five years. Five years ago we were receiving calls for locations of drug rehab centers in Ontario, primarily for street drugs, such as: cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, alcohol etc. We were able to send people to Detox programs and from there were able to get into treatment programs.
In the past years we have been getting an average of about 40% of our calls for legal prescription medication. Oxycodone, Percocet, Morphine, just to name a few. Most of the people calling us are addicted to it from a physical condition. They are not using the drug to get high as most drug addict do. They are people whom may have had an operation or been in an accidents, and needed the painkillers, but now do not know how to get off of them.
The scary part of it is there are not that many medical Detox centres that will take a person off prescription medication. Sometime people have to leave their cities to get in to a Detox centre because there is no help in their own city or town. The scarcity of help is alarming. People are sometimes left with themselves to face this problem.
In the late 1990’s Ontario’s Chief Coroner, Dr. Barry McLellan, asked that forensic scientists return and review death files from folks with drug overdoses for the past five years. They found that within 1999 and 2003 there had been between a four- and 5-fold increases in deceased persons where oxycodone had been detected in the blood of the deceased.
Because OxyContin posed such a health risk, a task force was founded in the two Atlantic Provinces, and in 2004 it counselled a series of measures, from tamper-proof prescription pads to youth education campaigns warning of OxyContin addiction risks.
The main thing is not that people should never take these types of medications, because they may need them after surgery or if they are in major pain. It is necessary to ease the pain, but it has to be monitored and also doctors and pharmacists should be more trained, and also advise patients to minimize the risk of abuse.
Withdrawing form oxycodone abuse can be far worse than what people were taking the medication for. Get informed and be cautious when using this type of prescribed medication. A few weeks or even less of regular usage of oxycodone and you experience some withdrawal effects of the drug. There are many effective oxycontin treatment centers.
