DRUG DEPENDENCE IN BRISBANE

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Most surveys of drug dependence are based mainly on hospital admissions, thus saying very little about the prevalence of the disorder in the general community or among non‐hospitalized patients. The present study examines the prevalence of drug‐taking among six groups of individuals—psychiatric in‐patients and out‐patients, medical and surgical in‐patients and out‐patients, patients attending a number of general practitioners' surgeries, and a group of healthy subjects attending a clinic for routine chest X‐ray examination. About 500 people in each group were interviewed, but they were not matched for age and sex. However, it was possible to draw matched samples from the six groups for intergroup comparison. In general it was found that whereas there was a high prevalence of barbiturate dependence in all patient groups, the prevalence of amphetamine and narcotic dependence was very small. Considerable numbers of people in all groups showed varying degrees of dependence on common analgesic preparations. The most severely affected patients were found in the two groups of psychiatric patients, who also had made attempts at suicide in the past. We noted with Interest the small number of people who used analgesic drugs for purposes of suicide. In the light of our investigation we propose that greater care should be exercised when prescribing barbiturates, and that some limits might be set to the universal availability of common analgesic drugs.

This publication has 10 references indexed in Scilit: