By Michael Snyder
#1 An astounding 70 million Americans are taking legal mind-altering drugs right now.
#2 According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, doctors wrote more than 250 million prescriptions for antidepressants during 2010.
#3 According to a study conducted by the Mayo Clinic, nearly 70 percent of all Americans are on at least one prescription drug. An astounding 20 percent of all Americans are on at least fiveprescription drugs.
#4 Americans spent more than 280 billion dollars on prescription drugs during 2013.
#5 According to the CDC, approximately 9 out of every 10 Americans that are at least 60 years old say that they have taken at least one prescription drug within the last month.
#6 There are 60 million Americans that “abuse alcohol”.
#7 According to the Department of Health and Human Services, 22 million Americans use illegal drugs.
#8 Incredibly, more than 11
percent of all Americans that are 12 years of age or older admit that
they have driven home under the influence of alcohol at least once
during the past year.
#9 According
to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there is an
unintentional drug overdose death in the United States every 19 minutes.
#10 In the United States today, prescription painkillers kill more Americans than heroin and cocaine combined.
#11 According to the CDC, approximately three quarters of a million people a year are rushed to emergency rooms in the United States because of adverse reactions to pharmaceutical drugs.
#12 According to Alternet,
“11 of the 12 new-to-market drugs approved by the Food and Drug
Administration were priced above $100,000 per-patient per-year” in 2012.
#13 The percentage of women taking antidepressants in America is higher than in any other country in the world.
#14 Many
of these antidepressants contain warnings that “suicidal thoughts” are
one of the side effects that should be expected. The suicide rate for
Americans between the ages of 35 and 64 rose by close to 30 percent between
1999 and 2010. The number of Americans that are killed by suicide now
exceeds the number of Americans that die as a result of car accidents
every year.
#15 In 2010, the average teen in the United States was taking 1.2 central nervous system drugs. Those are the kinds of drugs which treat conditions such as ADHD and depression.
#16 Children in the United States are three times more likely to be prescribed antidepressants as children in Europe are.
#17 A shocking Government Accountability Office report discovered that approximately one-third of all foster children in the United States are on at least one psychiatric drug.
#18 A survey conducted for the National Institute on Drug Abuse found that more than 15 percent of all U.S. high school seniors abuse prescription drugs.
#19 It turns out that dealing drugs is extremely profitable. The 11 largest pharmaceutical companies combined to rake in approximately $85,000,000,000 in profits in 2012.
In
America today, doctors are trained that there are just two potential
solutions to any problem. Either you prescribe a pill or you cut
someone open. Surgery and drugs are pretty much the only alternatives they offer us.
And an endless barrage of television commercials have trained all of us to think that there is a “pill for every problem”.
Are you in pain?
Just take a pill.
Are you feeling blue?
Just take a pill.
Do you need a spark in your marriage?
Just take a pill.
And most Americans assume that all of these pills are perfectly safe.
After all, the government would never approve something that wasn’t safe, right?
Sadly,
what most Americans don’t realize is that there is a revolving door
between big pharmaceutical corporations and the government agencies that
supposedly “regulate” them. Many of those that are now in charge of
our “safety” have spent their entire careers peddling legal drugs to all
of us.
We
have become a nation of drugged out zombies, and it is all perfectly
legal. The funny thing is that many of these “legal drugs” have just
slightly different formulations from their “illegal” counterparts.
If more Americans understood what they were actually taking, would that cause them to stop?
Perhaps some would, but for the most part Americans are totally in love with their drugs and giving them up would not be easy.
Just ask anyone that has tried.
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