The latest news out of the San Diego County Medical Examiner’s office might come as a bit of a surprise to the good but sometimes misguided (disappointingly political?) people of the Obama administration, who gifted to us Tan Diegans recently a contingent of California National Guard personnel­--250 citizen warriors wearing cammos and carrying side arms, part of a $500 million federal show of force to deter narco traffickers and other illegal activities.

According to a report released last week by the county Medical Examiner’s office, drug and alcohol use were the second leading cause of death in the county last year, after heart disease. Of 2,707 non-natural deaths reported and investigated in San Diego, 443 were judged to be caused by prescription medications, alcohol, and illegal drugs.

Prescription meds kill, too.

^{Photo by Ron Donoho}

Deputy medical examiner John Lucas pointed out a pronounced rise in deaths recently due to the abuse of prescription meds. The most commonly abused are analgesic pain relievers—synthetic narcotics. You’ve seen them on Intervention: Oxycodone, hydrocodone, fentanol, methadone, and so on. Swallowed, crushed and snorted, or injected, all of these drugs are powerfully addictive. And all of them are legal when prescribed by a physician.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has reported increases in illegal activities involving prescription drugs, especially among people under 30. The availability of some of the stuff in their parents’ medicine cabinets is a factor, Lucas said.

Dovetailing with this story is news of the arrest of a Los Angeles area osteopath suspected of improperly prescribing drugs. Though she has no particular specialty in the treatment of pain, her practice has been linked to at least eight overdose and suicide deaths in recent years, six of them people in their twenties—one victim was a frat member from Arizona State University who road tripped to the doctor’s office, in Rowland Heights, northeast of Fullerton, to obtain his prescriptions.

Many of the young patients who ODed were from Orange County. As kids, they played baseball, football, and soccer. They came from good families with nice homes. Some were bad-asses looking to drugs for excitement. Others were turned onto narcotics legitimately by the medical establishment. Victims of bad injuries—an ankle shattered riding a motorcycle, a broken knee from a snowboarding mishap, bad disks from a car accident—they found relief in pharmaceuticals.

The ones who died were no doubt troubled youth, looking for a way to shut out the world. People like narcotics for the way the drug turns off pain, both physical and emotional. You don’t do oxy when you’re looking for fun. You do it when it hurts too much to move or think.

San Diego deputy ME Lucas also noted another trend. People who become addicted to prescription painkillers often trade in their habits for heroin.

Because tolerance grows in users—and because the price points are so ridiculously high, even before the black-market inflation (another usurious element of the medical-industrial complex that runs our nation behind the scenes)—addicts find heroin cheaper and sometimes easier to obtain.

In this scenario, Lucas said, prescription drugs like oxycodone can be seen as “a gateway to heroin.”

So far this year, heroin deaths among the young in San Diego are up exponentially. During the first eight months of 2010, five people under twenty died from overdoses.

Only seven died in the previous six years combined.

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The tug of war between intoxication and control thus proceeds apace.

Going nowhere, fast.

Remember Prohibition? The Noble Experiment, 1920-1933. Temperance advocates thought they were creating a more pious and productive nation.

The result: A rise in organized crime and mob violence that remains woven into the fabric of our culture today (from Edward G. Robinson to Bonnie and Clyde to Scarface to Tupac and Biggie to the Sopranos).

Or take the Reagan-Bush era War on Drugs. At the cost of billions of tax-payer dollars, government efforts slowed to some degree the flow of drugs—cocaine, marijuana, heroin—coming across our border from Latin and South America and also the Golden Triangle area of Asia.

The result: A rise in the use of drugs manufactured within our own borders—ecstasy, crystal meth, and especially domestically grown marijuana, the last a thriving industry that supplies both the black market and also the burgeoning cannabis collectives to be found on every corner these days, contributing mightily to state and local coffers.

To that, we now add the rise of prescription drugs, neat and powerful stuff produced for pennies and sold for long dollars by companies with names we all know well. Probably they employ a good number of taxpaying citizens. Certainly they all pay their stockholders a good dividend. We won't even speak of the campain contributions, the lobbyists, all the rest.

You think the government wants to fight them?