I recently watched a Netflix documentary called 'Take Your Pills' which looked at the prescription drug abuse problem in america and how bad it really is, in the documentary they mainly followed college students and young people along with office professionals however they issue does really effect all people of all ages.
It is no surprise that most people will try drugs in their life because people always look to experience new things and drugs allow people to do that. However people still understand that there are many negative effects of taking drugs regularly and the majority of people that take any drug understand that.
Medication is advertised as something everyone should take for even small issues, add campaigns portray medicines as magic concoctions that heal you and only have side effects that will probably never happen to you. In reality medicines are just drugs that have a range of effects, some that are good and some that are bad.
Side effects
Personally I don't like how medicines are shown as having side effects because even in the name it is something to the side, not to worry about basically something to be looked over, I have even been told by doctors to not look at the side effects at all.
This just furthers that idea of medications having no downside when many widely prescribed drugs are very similar to regular street drugs and often have the same effects in the body. This just leads to people having more problems in later life because their kidneys and other organs are constantly being bombarded by strong chemicals.
People then take more medication for the problems other medications have caused. In America pharmaceutical companies just benefit massively of this cycle of people taking medication and then having to take other medication to fix the issues caused by the previous medication.
In England the NHS also suffers from over prescription which ends up crippling its own system, doctors over prescribe medication to get more money, while costing the NHS to supply the medicine and the same cycle as in America continues.