I have a story up on this subject today: http://www.thirdage.com/celebrities/was-whitney-houston-enabled-to-death. At this point, I think signs point to an investigation into who was prescribing the pills. It has already been determined that the meds came from the same pharmacy in Hollywood where Michael Jackson got his prescriptions under various names. Is there something people in her entourage could have done? I find it ingenuous that people interviewed claim she was "fine." She probably had never actually been sober. I had forgotten about her interview with Oprah when she admitted she was still drinking -- as if alcohol was not an addictive substance. Few addicts can drink socially when they have had such serious struggles with substance abuse. It's a slippery slope as they say in AA.
Thanks for posting this piece! It is a wonderful reminder to all of us who sometimes think it can't happen to me or them. Very apt to be posted on Valentine's Day.
Often addicts need look no further than their favorite doctor to enable them to death. "But they're prescribed...", is all the excuse many addicts need to satisfy their drug-craving brain. It's as if going against doctor's orders by refusing to take a prescription for an addictive drug will threaten their lives. The added bonus is the addict now has someone else to blame for their problem. Unfortunately, the addicted brain doesn't know the difference between alcohol from a liquor bottle and alcohol in an over the counter cough syrup. It doesn't know the difference between drugs bought from a dealer in a seedy part of town and drugs prescribed by your friendly family doctor. Recovering addicts and physicians need to be educated and hyper-viligent for sobriety to have a chance. In my experience, many doctors still don't perceive alcohol and drug addiction as a disease. The easiest thing to do is to prescribe a drug that treats the symptoms but worsens the disease--sometimes fatally.
Thanks Gretchen. One more reason we need a national registry for pharmacies so that every prescription ordered by a person is on file and accessible.
When the drugs your doctors give you are chemically the same only more potent than drugs sold on the street, there's a clear problem. When prescription pills kill more every year than all illegal drugs *put together*, there's a problem. Unfortunately, big pharma wouldn't let something like this pass. Alcohol, tobacco, and prescription pills are *often* more dangerous than illegal drugs like heroine, cocaine, speed, or (especially) marijuana thanks in large part to their legal status. Doctors don't really know any better, or they don't care: they are a product of the system, too, and honestly thanks to direct-to-consumer marketing people can merely ask their doc for whatever pills they think they need, and doctors are notorious for assembly-line patient-care where they don't want to argue with patients, especially determined addicts. And since big pharma has two hands in every doctor's pocket it seems, sending them endless samples and barraging them with pushy sales, this sort of attitude is almost inevitable. Doctors are taught that modern medicine heals, and while this is sometimes true, the answer doesn't always lie at the bottom of a pill bottle, especially for an addict. I hate to say it, but there's just too much money being made for reforms. This is America after all, and free enterprise is always "right", no matter how many people die.
My friend, who pays for health insurance for her employees, just called livid that one of her employees, who has been hospitalized for drug abuse in the past, was given Vicodan, a narcotic, for pain from an earache. Who does that? I never heard of prescribing Vicodan, a drug which is often abused by addicts, for an EARACHE!!! Another example of a physician being oblivious to the facts of addiction.
And consider this: these doctors go to very expensive medical school kids in the inner city could NEVER afford, often coming from stable, healthy families that can afford to send them or can handle the massive debt. They learn and study to become doctors...and then use that knowledge to hand dangerous pills to addicts. Pills that can, and by a matter of fact do, kill thousands of people each year; more than illegal drugs, certainly. However, a young black man that wasn't born in a wealthy neighborhood and had no hope of going to medical school or even college sells statistically less dangerous drugs to someone because they, too need to eat, and they are given 25 to life, at the massive expense of taxpayers, too, because these drugs are "recreational" and thus evil. It seems to me there ought to be a lot more doctors in jail side-by-side with drug dealers, or else we ought to not throw drug dealers in jail for doing the same thing doctors do, only in a more honest way...after all, at least with drug dealers, they aren't lying and tell you to take the pills because it is medicine, then shrugging when you get addicted... This system is just a hypocritical, expensive, and tragic mess.