What substances are commonly abused?

When working in the medical care system, the combination of a high stress environment, long work hours, and unsatisfactory working conditions can lead to a reliance on or increased usage of various substances, both legal and illegal. When discussing the substances most commonly abused among medical professionals, it is important to consider the ease of access that many professionals have to opiates and Central Nervous System depressants, and the effect that this accessibility may have on their tendency to abuse the substances.

For example, studies have shown that nurses are, compared to the general population, much more likely to use prescription drugs than other substances, such as cocaine or marijuana (Trinkoff, Storr, & Wall, 1999). This disproportionate use of prescription substances stems mainly from the ability of healthcare professionals to obtain these drugs easily and often, as well as the common misperception by many professionals that their knowledge of the drug will enable them to “control” the drug use (Dunn, 2005).

More specifically, different specialties can promote different drug abuse tendencies. For example, professionals working in critical care units (emergency rooms, intensive care units, operating rooms or post-anesthesia care units) are reported as more likely to use prescription drugs as a result of easy access when compared to non-critical care medical professionals. Aside from drug accessibility, critical care settings contain “increased frequency of dealing with death, [an] unpredictable work pace, the immediacy of the nursing intervention, reliance on pharmacologic agents, [and] heavy work demands” (Dunn, 2005). These numerous pressures make stress alleviation through drug use an increasingly common occurrence.

When faced with the pressure of long working hours and high stress work conditions, many healthcare professionals turn to tobacco and alcohol to “de-stress”. However, as innocent as these substances seem initially, a reliance on these legal substances can in fact result in a drug related “slippery slope” effect, making it “easy for medical professionals to get initiated into substance use and promote subsequent addiction” (Bhan, 2009).

In a 2008 medical study performed among several thousand medical students from 76 different colleges; 7.1% used alcohol, 6.1% used oral or smoking tobacco, and 6.7% admitted to lifetime use of illicit drugs (Rai, Gaete, Girotra, Pal, & Araya, 2008). Given the fact that drug use problems often become even more exacerbated once medical students complete their education and face the new stresses of the professional world, these statistics present a major problem facing the medical system overall. In fact, among nurses alone, a recent study has shown that approximately 10% of the nursing population has a drug abuse problem, and that 6-8% of nurses abuse drugs to the extent that it may impair their professional judgment.

Overall, while medical professionals do not often use substances that many conceive of as dangerous drugs, the increasingly common abuse of alcohol, tobacco, and prescription drugs represents a momentous problem amidst the health care world that should not be taken lightly.

See what Rebecca Mason, RN, CNS, CEAP thinks about this question, and why she believes these substances are used: VIDEO http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxXxar_YbUM

Resources:
Dunn, D. (2005, October). Substance abuse among nurses: defining the issue. Retrieved November 20, 2009, from BNET webste: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FSL/is_4_82/ai_n15754444/pg_2/?tag=content;col1

Rai D., Gaete J., Girotra S., Pal H.R., & Araya R. (2008). Substance use among medical students: Time to reignite the debate? The National Medical Journal of India 21(2), 75-78.

Trinkoff, A.M., Storr C. L., & Wall M.P. (1999). Prescription-type drug misuse and workplace access among nurses. Journal of Addictive Diseases, 18(1), 9-17.