Why Vicodin Addiction Is Common

Doctors write over 130 million Vicodin prescriptions each year for patients experiencing pain, making it the most frequently prescribed painkiller in the country. While effective as a narcotic pain reliever, Vicodin can be highly addictive. This often leaves the Vicodin dependent person craving more, long after the source of their physical discomfort has healed.

Widespread Access and Affordability of Vicodin

In recent years, Vicodin dependent people have fostered their dependency with tactics like falsified or altered prescriptions, drug theft and loosely monitored Internet purchases. In fact, a 2006 survey of seniors in high school found that 10 percent of them had abused Vicodin within the prior year. For those purchasing Vicodin from street dealers, the relatively low price per tablet enables widespread consumption and easy access outside the health care system.

Why Dependent People Use Vicodin

Vicodin’s active painkiller is hydrocodone, a codeine derivative that causes similar opioid effects to morphine. Due to its structure, hydrocodone can pass through the blood-brain barrier, enabling easy absorption into the system. When combined with alcohol, hydrocodone’s sedative effects–and risks to the body–tend to increase.

What Makes Vicodin Addictive?

As an opiate, Vicodin has a chemical structure similar to heroin. This causes Vicodin to target the brain’s neuropathways in order to prevent pain awareness in the brain. Additionally, Vicodin also causes an increase of dopamine in the brain, causing users to feel euphoric.

However, Vicodin’s half-life is relatively short–just under four hours. In laymen’s terms, this means that it wears off fairly quickly, having two important effects. First, its short half life means that the user must increase their dosage in order to sustain Vicodin’s effects. With increased use comes increased tolerance, necessitating that the dependent individual take even more Vicodin to obtain the same euphoric feelings. Secondly, as the drug wears off, withdrawal symptoms begin to set in–including chills, nausea, irritability and vomiting. Intense Vicodin withdrawal can also include muscle spasms, loss of appetite, diarrhea and panic. Vicodin dependent individuals then seek to remove these withdrawal symptoms by taking more Vicodin, locking them into a cycle of dependency.

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