Recreational Use of Prescription Drugs Rising
Today's CESAR FAX reported on the availability of different drugs to undergraduate students at a large university. The top of the list: alcohol (100%), marijuana (95%), Adderall (89%), Ritalin (71%) thought the drugs were either "very easy" or "easy" to obtain. That study builds upon the new SAHMSA report on prescription drugs. There are now more people initiating prescription drug use every year (2.7 million) than are initiating marijuana use (2.1 million). This is partly due to the fact that marijuana has been popular much longer, and therefore has a much smaller pool of never-used people to draw from. Taken together, this data shows a trend of increasing use of prescription drugs, especially among young adults.