According to UN-affiliated body, International Narcotics Control Board (http://www.incb.org/incb/index.html), abuse of prescription drugs is about to exceed the use of illicit street narcotics worldwide.
Prescription drug abuse already has surpassed traditional illegal junkies such as heroin, cocaine and Ecstasy in parts of Europe, Africa and South Asia as revealed by INCB in its annual report for 2006. The direct impact has been the availability of such prescription drugs to the abusers and more seriously will be a shift in culture towards such otherwise legal, and safe drugs.
The commonly abuse prescription drugs are painkillers, stimulants & tranquilizers. Unregulated markets in many countries make it easy for traffickers to peddle a wide variety of counterfeit drugs. This has spawned a lethal new trade in counterfeit painkillers, sedatives and other medicines with the help of modern business tools and technologies like courier services, the speedmail and the Internet.
Buprenorphine, an analgesic, is now the main injection drug in most of India, and it is also trafficked and abused in tablet form in France, where the Narcotics Control Board estimates 20-25 percent of the drug sold commercially as Subutex is being diverted to the black market. In Singapore, MOH has reclassified buprenorphine as CD since August last year due to “unacceptable” level of abuse and the return of needle culture.
According to INCB, the number of Americans abusing prescription drugs nearly doubled from 7.8 million in 1992 to 15.1 million in 2003. Among their prescription drugs of choice: the painkillers oxycodone, sold under the trade name OxyContin, and hydrocodone, sold as Vicodin and used by 7.4 percent of college students in 2005.
It singled out Scandinavia, where demand for flunitrazepam — a sedative sold as Rohypnol and widely known as a "date rape drug" — increasingly is being met by unauthorized production, and North America, where widespread abuse of prescription drugs, including the narcotic fentanyl — 80 times as potent as heroin — has been blamed for a spike in deaths.
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