It’s worth tak­ing some time to dis­cuss more about drug safety.  Say­ing any­thing about the “dan­gers of drugs” may find you think­ing about Just Say No, maybe This Is Your Brain on Drugs com­mer­cials, or for the younger gen­er­a­tion the very graphic images from the Mon­tana Meth Project.

Pub­lic ser­vice cam­paigns have a his­tory of mixed suc­cess against drug and alco­hol abuse mea­sures.  Cam­paigns to reduce drunk dri­ving episodes and tobacco use have been fairly successful

How­ever, there is not yet any wide­spread infor­ma­tion cam­paign about the qui­etest pub­lic health epi­demic in his­tory — death, injury, and lost pro­duc­tiv­ity from pre­scrip­tion drugs.  Ille­gal drugs and alco­hol remain potent forces of dam­age in Amer­i­can soci­ety, but the scale of the prob­lem is eclipsed by pre­scrip­tion drug problems.

The data in the graph is from DAWN, the Drug Abuse Warn­ing Net­work.  DAWN tab­u­lates drug — and — alco­hol — related vis­its to emer­gency depart­ments and drug — related deaths inves­ti­gated by med­ical examiners.

More con­tent and edi­to­r­ial later — here’s the graph.  Look at how the red line, which shows the count of pre­scrip­tion drug events show­ing up in EDs, ver­sus alco­hol and ille­gal drugs in var­i­ous combination.

And for those of you in Denver: