HEALTH NATION

Hey, Buddy, Can You Spare A Pill?

In one-on-one interviews with 700 Americans, roughly 23 percent reported loaning their meds to someone else, and 27 percent reported borrowing prescription medications, Reuters reports. The drugs most frequently loaned or borrowed? Allergy drugs, such as Allegra (25 percent), followed by painkillers like Darvoset and OxyContin (22 percent); and antibiotics such as amoxicillin (21 percent).

Seven percent reported sharing mood-altering drugs like Paxil, Zoloft, Ritalin and Valium. And slightly more than 6 percent shared the Accutane acne drug, while 5 percent shared birth control pills, according to the findings published online by the American Journal of Public Health.

“This isn’t terribly surprising, however, the extent of sharing was higher than we expected,” Richard Goldsworthy, R&D director at The Academic Edge, an educational tools company, tells Reuters. “While ideally people should never share any medications, realistically, people do in fact share them and in many cases, such as allergy medicine, doing so is beneficial and carries little risk.” But he notes there are risks sharing meds, such as antibiotics and those that are “teratogenic,” which cause birth defects.

The survey also showed that whites (23 percent) and Hispanics (26 percent) were more apt to share prescription pain medicines than were African-Americans (14 percent). Women were more apt than men to share antibiotics (24 percent vs 12 percent). And people seemed most willing to share meds when the drug came from a family member, they had a prescription for a particular med but ran out of it or did not have it with them, or they had an emergency.

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