From: deputyfife23x@gmail.com   
      
   WND EXCLUSIVE    
   70 MILLION AMERICANS TAKING MIND-ALTERING DRUGS    
       
   Exclusive: David Kupelian tells untold story of nation's rapidly escalating   
   drug dependence    
   Published: 7 hours ago    
    author-image DAVID KUPELIAN    
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   The heroin-overdose death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman has caused the media   
   to focus, however fleetingly, on America’s drug problem.    
      
   News accounts of the Oscar-winner’s tragic demise typically reference the   
   startling increase in heroin-related deaths in the last four to five years.   
   The problem, reporters explain, is the vast number of Americans addicted to   
   prescription pain meds    
   like OxyContin, many of whom discover heroin to be both cheaper and easier to   
   obtain than the prescription opioid drugs to which they initially became   
   addicted.    
      
   That’s accurate as far as it goes. But by following the trail further, we   
   arrive at a place far more shocking and consequential. We discover that not   
   only has the traditional distinction between illegal “street drugs” and   
   legal “therapeutic    
   prescription drugs” become so blurred as to be almost nonexistent, but   
   between America’s twin drug epidemics – one illegal, the other legal –   
   well over 70 million Americans are using mind-altering drugs. And that number   
   doesn’t include abusers    
   of alcohol, which adds an additional 60 million Americans. So we’re really   
   talking about 130 million strung-out Americans. How is this possible?    
      
   Of course, most of the drug news we’ve heard lately has been about pot. It   
   started with medical marijuana, with state after state successfully defying   
   the federal ban. Then on Jan. 1, flat-out legalization took center stage, when   
   Colorado and    
   Washington opened their doors to exhilarated pot-smokers, while numerous other   
   states – from Alaska, Oregon and California in the west to Massachusetts,   
   Rhode Island and Washington, D.C., in the east – announced plans to push for   
   legalization in the    
   coming months.    
      
   As a result, stock prices for cannabis companies soared (“The demand for   
   marijuana is insatiable,” says one entrepreneur, “you have a feeding   
   frenzy for the birth of a new industry”), the New York City-based   
   publication “High Times” announced    
   a new private-equity fund to “raise $100 million over the next two years to   
   invest in cannabis-related businesses,” and ad agencies geared up to support   
   “an industry estimated to already be generating revenues in the billions of   
   dollars.”    
      
   The dramatic change in Americans’ attitude is reflected in a recent CNN poll   
   headlined “Support for legal marijuana soaring.”    
      
   Somehow, in all the hoopla, it apparently doesn’t register that pot use   
   lowers the IQ of young people. A massive, four-decade study published in 2012   
   by the National Academy of Sciences, titled “Persistent cannabis users show   
   neuropsychological    
   decline from childhood to midlife,” followed more than 1,000 subjects from   
   birth until age 38! The researchers’ core finding? Repeated marijuana use by   
   teenagers lowers their IQ – permanently.    
      
   Yet, according to a 2010 study by the federal Department of Health and Human   
   Services, over 22 million Americans use illegal drugs, comprising   
   marijuana/hashish, cocaine (including crack), heroin, hallucinogens, inhalants   
   and prescription-type    
   psychiatric and opioid drugs used without a prescription. And of those, fully   
   half admit to driving on the public roadways under the influence of drugs!    
      
   Of course, when we think of driving “under the influence,” our minds turn   
   to alcohol, so fasten your seatbelts: In 2010, nearly one-quarter of all   
   Americans aged 12 and up participated in binge drinking, about 58.6 million   
   people, and heavy drinking    
   was reported for 16.9 million people. And an estimated 11.4 percent of persons   
   12 or older drove under the influence of alcohol at least once in the past   
   year.    
      
   Bottom line, according to HHS: “In an average year 30 million Americans   
   drive drunk [and] 10 million drive impaired by illicit drugs.”    
      
   ‘Fastest growing drug problem’    
      
   So with more than 22 million Americans stupefied on illegal drugs and another   
   58 million with a serious drinking problem – that’s 80 million souls –   
   and 40 million of them driving under the influence of intoxicants, the nation   
   undeniably suffers    
   from a massive “substance-abuse” problem.    
      
   But there is another parallel drug problem, the devastation of which is   
   arguably just as severe and detrimental to American society as that involving   
   illegal drugs and alcohol abuse – and some would say it’s actually worse.    
      
   And that is the astonishingly vast, and rapidly increasing, number of people   
   taking medically prescribed but poorly understood, mind-altering psychiatric   
   drugs. Indeed, today one in five adults – approximately 50 million Americans   
   – take prescription    
   psychiatric drugs.    
      
   Ironically, after marijuana (which is rapidly becoming legal), the most-abused   
   drugs in America are prescription drugs, obtained and used “no   
   -medically,” that is, without a prescription from a doctor.    
      
   As revealed in a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and   
   Prevention, in one recent year “approximately 27,000 unintentional drug   
   overdose deaths occurred in the United States, one death every 19 minutes.”    
      
   “Prescription drug abuse,” announced the CDC, “is the fastest growing   
   drug problem in the United States.”    
      
   The skyrocketing rate of drug-overdose death rates “has been driven,” says   
   the report, “by increased use of a class of prescription drugs called opioid   
   analgesics” – drugs like hydrocodone (brand names Norco, Vicodin),   
   hydromorphone (Dilaudid,    
   Exalgo), oxycodone (OxyContin, Percocet) and morphine (Astramorph, Avinza).    
      
   “Opioid analgesics suppress your perception of pain,” explains WebMD,   
   “and calm your emotional response to pain by reducing the number of pain   
   signals sent by the nervous system and the brain’s reaction to those pain   
   signals.”    
      
      
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