Unless you have been on a deserted island for the past few years, you have to realize that prescription drug abuse is rampant in America and around the world. Celebrities too fall victim to the virulent talons of prescription medication.
This most certainly is the case for those entering the Malibu Beach Recovery Center, a rehab clinic for the rich and famous, clings like a determined survivor to a picturesque hillside a short drive from the Malibu movie colony in California.
According to nbclosangeles.com, in just the past year alone, street drugs have given way to something just as deadly among the high-end clientele seeking help here.
It is hard to believe that the biggest “dealer” in the area is parents’ medicine cabinet!
A long time veteran in Hollywood said that 60 percent of her new clients are addicts hooked on prescription meds – and not just the anti-anxieties, like Xanax or Klonopin. More and more of them, she said, are zoned out on heavy-hitters like Fentanyl, often used by cancer patients.
Fentanyl, a pain killer many times more powerful than morphine, is sometimes applied by skin patch.
Actors tend to use their skills to keep their medicine cabinets well-stocked with extras. Two brothers put together a traveling tear-jerker in which one wheeled the other into an ER, posing as a disabled man in desperate need of instant high-powered pain relief.
They were so convincing that the state of Colorado later hired one of them to help spot scam artists working the urgent-care circuit.
Another actor became so practiced at playing the all-suffering clinic-crawler that she knew exactly how many milligrams of a certain pill a doctor should prescribe to keep her high. The doctor was so relieved at having his diagnostic chores eased that he promptly put her on a diladin drip. After taking several hits of the drug, the woman asked to be unhooked so she could grab a cigarette break.
Holy crud!
One paramedic referred to her as the “perfect patient.”
For some, their special taste was for booze laced with Xanax, an increasingly popular combo with pill addicts.
The same debilitating cocktail popped up as a featured player in news stories about Whitney Houston’s last days of hard partying. Houston was never a patient at the center.
The biggest problem is that there’s no public database for tracking prescriptions nationwide, from state to state.
The epidemic of both celebrities and the mainstream population becoming addicted to prescription medication cannot be ignored. We need more drug classes and counseling. The truest remedy lies in keeping our youth from ever experimenting with drugs in the first place.