80% of World’s Painkillers Consumed by Americans

There's a drug epidemic raging across the country right now. But it's not meth, or cocaine, or even marijuana. It's prescription painkillers.

Americans consume 80 percent of the world's supply of painkillers -- more than 110 tons of pure, addictive opiates every year -- as the country's prescription drug abuse epidemic explodes.

That's enough drugs to give every single American 64 Percocets or Vicodin. And pain pill prescriptions continue to surge, up 600 percent in ten year, thanks to doctors who are more and more willing to hand out drugs to patients who are suffering.

As more people get their hands on these potentially-dangerous drugs, more are taking them to get high. Their drug abuse leads to 14,800 deaths a year -- more than from heroin and cocaine combined.

'We've become a society of wusses,' Long Island, New York, pharmacist Howard Levine told the BBC.

Well, going through 4 years of an Obama presidency is enough to make anyone sick, I think. But this pharmacist has it right, we Americans have become too soft. A little pain isn't going to kill if if you know how to treat it properly without resorting to prescription drugs. And I don't like it that doctors are so quick to shell out a prescription without asking a lot of question. As a nation, we need to "cowboy up," and push through the pain.