Drug Abuse Solutions

Register to read the introduction… In April 2011, President Obama addressed the issue in the White House position paper, Epidemic: Responding to America’s Prescription Drug Abuse Crisis. The Obama administration announced it would seek legislation-requiring doctors to undergo training before being permitted to prescribe potent narcotics (Smith 68). The current most popular solutions at any level have included solutions such as requiring physicians to gain certification of training in addictive mediation and applying a system of monitoring for those who are prescribing and being prescribed these medications. There have been more spins offs of these two ideas as well, such as harsh punishment for diving under the influence of these drugs. The FDA is currently undergoing investigations of how they can productively address the opioid abuse in America, “taking action to protect patients from serious harm due to these drugs, [finding a] careful balance between continued access to these necessary medications and stronger measures to reduce their risks.” (Smith 70). Another solution that has been investigated is creating a pill an abusive resistant formula for these medications, “ensuring the relatively steady release of medicine into the bloodstream instead of the rapid surge preferred by abusers achieves treatment goals while frustrating attempts at getting high” (DuPont 130). Prescription drug abuse is a big concern for not only being tackled at the national level, but also the individual states. At the state level, “strategies to address this complex problem have included: establishing and strengthening prescription drug monitoring programs, regulating pain management facilities, and establishing dosage thresholds above which a consult with a pain specialist is required” (Garcia 4). Many other agencies such as the American Society for Addiction Medicine have …show more content…
Social problems then result from the dysfunction of certain parts. Prescription drugs have productive function in society. They ease the pain of patients and help the, recovery from ailment. They also give doctors and pharmacists the means to cure patients thus giving them jobs. But the dysfunction occurs once the drugs begin to be over used, abused and sold illegally. However, this dysfunction also functions to give jobs in the area of criminal justice and social service agencies dealing with addiction. All in all, the functionalist view finds good and evil in social problems. Although ultimately the goal is to eliminate dysfunction, this process offers productive functioning to the society members working against the problem. Symbolic Interactionism focuses more on a micro level, rather than the macro level of functionalism. They view society as the compilation of interactions between society members. Social problems then are based on people’s learned behaviors and defining a social problem is subjective to society members (Kendall 19). Symbolic interactionists believe that prescription drug abuse would have to be a learned behavior. Data from the National Survey on Drug