Safety Tips: Drug Abuse.

A friend of mine once told me a story about his colleague that died as a result of prolong self-medication of paracetamol. A postmortem carried out on the deceased revealed that the actual cause of the death was heart related disease. Further investigation carried out revealed a heart-breaking story of the victim consistent complain of headache and when he was advised to go for medical examination, will rather take paracetamol to supress the headache. Unfortunately he was not alive to learn from his mistakes.

Now some of us reading this write up are also victims of similar circumstance, we often take un-prescribed drugs or over the counter drugs and in the process tend to abuse drugs.

Majority of the people think drug abuse is only the use of “hard drugs” like cocaine, marijuana, nicotine, amphetamines, cannabis, opium alkaloids etc, not knowing that “cheap drugs” like paracetamol can also be abused.

By definition, drug abuse can be defined as the habitual, excessive and self-damaging use of habit forming drugs or substances, leading to addiction or dependence, serious physiological injury (such as damage to kidneys, liver, heart) and/or psychological harm (such as dysfunctional behaviour patterns, hallucinations, memory loss) or death.

From the above definition, we can see that any drug taking habitually either “hard drug” or “cheap drug” most especially without prescription is termed drug abuse.

Drug abuse can be prevented by complete avoidance of self-medication or un-prescribed drugs. Whenever, you are ill, seek medical attention.