Prescription Drug Abuse in Florida

Prescription drug abuse kills more than 7 Floridians per day. This number is 5 times greater than deaths caused by all illicit drugs combined, making it the number one public health and safety concern in Florida. It's also important to the child welfare community, since one-third to two-thirds of child maltreatment cases involve parental substance abuse.

The Florida Office of the Attorney General has developed a comprehensive plan to tackle the problem, Florida’s Prescription Drug Diversion and Abuse Roadmap (2012–2015). It's about forty pages long, but we've boiled it down to some highlights:

1.  Prescription drug abuse affects our community in a number of ways, one of which is child abuse and neglect. Many cases of prescription drug abuse start as legal prescriptions, but without proper treatment for addiction, the increased emergency room visits, child abuse and neglect, and crime creates a burden on society.

2.  The overall goal of prevention is twofold: (1) to increase the lawful and medically appropriate compliance to prescription drug use by patients and physicians, and (2) to reduce the abuse of prescription drugs and their negative consequences.

3. An increasing number of children are born with Neonatal Withdrawal Syndrome as a result of mothers' abuse of drugs while pregnant. Florida experienced a fourfold increase in instances of Neonatal Withdrawal Syndrome from 2003 to 2010.

The problem of expectant mothers abusing pain medication has become so prevalent that All Children’s Hospital in Tampa estimates that at any given time there are at least 10 newborns being treated for prescription drug withdrawal. These numbers may, in fact, be much higher than reported because many pregnant women are neither tested for drug use, nor admit to using prescription drugs during pregnancy. 

4. Florida in particular has been a hub of prescription drug abuse because of its permissive laws toward doctors' prescriptions of pain killers. Here exist "pill mills": illicit merchants of prescription drugs under the guise of pain management clinics. People visit these places because prescription drugs, usually painkillers, are cheaper and easier to obtain than elsewhere.

5. Prescription drug abusers are likely to have used illicit drugs in the past. Other correlated factors include "time spent in jail, a family history of substance use disorders, cigarette smoking, post-traumatic stress disorder, being a non-Hispanic white male, and/or having a high degree of pain-related limitations" (page 28).

6. Children who learn about the risks of drugs from their parents or caregivers are up to 50 percent less likely to use drugs. If children make it to adulthood without experimenting with drugs, they become far less likely to start using later in life. Although a caregiver is most effective at educating children about drug abuse, part of the Florida plan is to increase education.

7. There is a myth out there that prescription drug abuse is "safer" than illicit drug use. This is simply not true. Dispelling this myth is crucial in order to make progress in prevention.

Read more about Florida's plan to reduce prescription drug abuse here.