Not your father's pharmacy

[Geee]

Washington Examiner:

They used to be the friendly neighborhood place where you went to get razor blades or Band-Aids, toiletries or the occasional prescription the doctor gave you. Today, as America's population uses more prescription medications than at any other time in history, the face of America's pharmacies is changing. And, in some sinister cases, the activity taking place inside these stores is far from legitimate.

You've probably noticed that your pharmacy now has a video surveillance system and maybe a uniformed guard, and the pharmacist may have to retrieve your order from a locked safe. At closing time, they might roll down a metal cage to cover the counter or let loose guard dogs to patrol inside the store. This isn't your father's pharmacy anymore, and the reason is a shame: Prescription drug abuse has now become an epidemic in America.

It's become a much bigger problem than street sales of drugs like heroin, marijuana and cocaine. The Drug Enforcement Administration says some 7 million Americans now use prescription drugs for non-medical reasons — and most of the abused drugs are narcotic painkillers containing OxyContin and hydrocodone. Because pharmacies often stock large quantities of such pills, they have become ground zero for both drug pushers (who know each pill can fetch up to $80 on the street) and desperate drug addicts intent on getting what they want.

But in some cases the theft of these costly drugs is perpetrated from the inside — by drug store employees who use their position as a front for their illicit activities.

Federal investigators have gotten wise to both these groups.

The DEA confirms it is currently investigating half a dozen Walgreens drug stores across Florida after they red-flagged a massive spike in OxyContin purchases. One store, for example, bought 95,000 doses of the painkiller in 2009. Last year, that same store bought more than 2 million doses. The DEA says that's about 30 percent more than a typical pharmacy would buy, so it served the nation's largest drug store chain with federal search warrants and is currently pouring over paperwork to try to determine where all those narcotics went.

[Draggingtree]

The Legalization Cure for the Heroin Epidemic

MARCH 28, 2016 Mark Thornton

A heroin epidemic has been spreading across the United States, expanding enormously for the last several years. With it, the number of people dying has also increased dramatically. While politicians offer failed solutions like “securing the borders,” the real solution is to legalize drugs.

 

The number of drug overdoses in the US is approaching 50,000 per year. Of that number nearly 20,000 are attributed to legal pain killers, such as Oxycontin. More than 10,000 die of heroin overdoses. I believe these figures vastly underestimate the number of deaths that are related to prescription drug use.

 

The “face” of the heroin epidemic has changed since the 1960s when it was largely contained to urban “junkies” and Vietnam veterans. In recent years the epidemic spread to suburbia as heroin became a low-cost substitute for other drugs. In more recent times, the epidemic has spread to rural areas such as fishing villages in Maine and coal mining towns in Pennsylvania and West Virginia

 

The problem of the epidemic rests with two causes. The first is the War on Drugs which creates profit incentives in the black market for the distribution of the most dangerous drugs. The second is the pharmaceutical-medical-FDA complex, or Big Pharma, which profits from treating pain with dangerous pharmaceutical drugs.

https://mises.org/library/legalization-cure-heroin-epidemic