If some man you didn’t know were to approach you on the street and offer you a white pill,

claiming that it would solve your problems(with a few side effects), would you take it? Probably
not, right? Now, imagine you have the same knowledge of this product, but instead of
approaching you on the street, this man is on T.V. Now would you take it? Considering the fact
that 70% of Americans are currently on medication, your answer would most likely change.

The U.S makes up about five percent of the world’s population, but consumes around eighty
percent of the painkillers made, according to “Players In The Pharmaceutical Industry.” A study
conducted by The Kaiser Family Foundation showed that on average, Americans of all ages are
prescribed between eleven and twenty eight different medications. For me, this is morally wrong
in many different ways. This means that all around America, it is the normal to be in an altered
state of mind, being the unaltered version of yourself is out of the ordinary. As the opioid
epidemic rises, it’s hard not to point the finger at Big Pharma. As reported by Psychology
today(“Prescription Drugs Are More Deadly Than Street Drugs”), the rates of death by overdose
have more than tripled since 1990, and have historically never been higher. Abuse of
prescription painkillers alone lead to over four hundred seventy five thousand emergency room
visits in 2009. In 2010, over twelve million people admitted to abusing prescription drugs
regularly, bringing me to the conclusion that America is drugged up, and somehow, it’s perfectly
legal.

Ignorance is bliss, but not when it comes to altering the chemicals in our brain. When you get
prescribed a certain medication, you’re most likely under the assumption that the doctor who
prescribed it is well informed about the effects of the medicine on your brain. The scary truth is
that they know just about as much as you could learn in a two minute advertisement; it’s not
much. You would think that, since prescription medication is so widely and commonly used, the
pharmaceutical industry would put forth effort and resources into researching the medications,
but the truth of the matter is they don’t care if it helps you, they care if you buy it or not. To Big
Pharma, advertising is first priority. This is proved by the unnecessarily large amount of money
they spend on advertising, leaving not much left for the actual research. According to the article
previously mentioned (Players In The Pharmaceutical Industry), big pharmaceutical companies
spend 19 times more money on advertising than on the actual research and manufacturing of
the drug. In 2014 the average amount of money spent on advertising was 4.53 billion dollars.
The most unsettling part, however, is not the amount of money spent on advertising, but the fact
that ​it works. ​Studies show that most doctors are nine times more likely to recommend drugs
that are heavily advertised than those that aren’t. This could be for many reasons, such as the
doctors getting paid handsomely by the certain company to advertise their product. It could also
be as simple as people are afraid of the unknown, they’d rather take something they’ve heard
of.

To put it simply, my philosophy on how to solve the issue is education. Knowledge is power,
education is the best weapon you can have. Know your body, and know what goes in your
body. The biggest problem of opioids is that we take them in a place of ignorance. Contending
with John Rawls’ philosophy of putting on a ‘veil of ignorance’, I believe we should never come
to putting medicine in our body from a place of ignorance and jeopardize our bodies with
something we aren’t aware of. Opioid addiction begins from the company that overproduces the
painkillers, and is enforced by doctors overprescribing, which leads to patients overusing. I think
as humans, we need to realize it’s okay not to be okay, we don’t need to be shoving pills in our
body at the slightest discomfort. It’s not that we should completely get rid of all painkillers as I
realize that they can, of course, be necessary; It’s that we should be educated enough about the
effects (both positive and negative) of prescription drugs to know that we cannot depend on
them. The negative effects of both addiction and the drug itself outweigh the need to stop a
minor pain. Educating ourselves is the way to go about the opioid epidemic, for if we know
enough to not overprescribe and overuse medication, we shouldn’t let people get to the point of
needing rehab.