New ways to tackle growing abuse of prescription drugs are being discussed by hundreds of medical experts at a scientific meeting in Adelaide.
About 500 Australian and international delegates are at the three-day meeting of the Australian Professional Society on Alcohol and other Drugs (APSAD).
Society president Dr Rose Neild said people using both prescription and over-the-counter drugs for such things as chronic pain could find them highly addictive.
“It has been an expanding problem affecting Australians [and] people often don’t realise how badly they are affected until quite significant harms have occurred,” she said.
“For example, people who are using over-the-counter codeine in large amounts may not actually present for help until perhaps they’ve had some adverse effect because of the other medications [being used] at the same time.”
She said there had been some changes to how medications were supplied but it had not been enough to ease the addiction rates to some common drugs, both prescription and non-prescription.
“They’ve become pharmacist-only [dispensing], being taken off the shelf and out of supermarkets, this however hasn’t been quite enough,” she said.
“The next step is going to be about policy makers, the changers of legislation, but right down to people who are writing prescriptions [and] down to people who are living in the community and are becoming aware that perhaps one of their family members is using a lot of over-the-counter or prescription medication and helping them to become aware there is a problem and getting them along for help.
“I see it as a very broad, whole-of-community approach that’s needed.”
Dr Neild said medical experts were discussing how to best achieve early intervention for parents abusing drugs so that their children did not end up in state care.
“The issue here is about creating accessible intervention for these parents so that they’re able to recover and continue to positively care for their children, so that we’re not actually in the situation where we’re looking to remove large numbers of children from their families,” she said.
“The research bears up that early and sustained intervention is what makes the difference and that women who have had a history of substance abuse, given adequate support and programs, can parent as well as – dare I say – any of the rest of us.”