Well yes but those numbers don't necessarily mean that most people are on pills. People who use and especially people who abuse drugs are on multiple different kinds and people who end up in the hospital due to overdose trends to be repeat offenders. It's like how the fact that most marriage ends in divorce is due to people who divorce getting divorced three, four, five times in their lives. The easy statistics to get very rarely prove what the source providing them intend for them to suggest. We live in a post-truth world.
I'm not saying that I have a reputable and definitive source suggesting that most wealthy people are on prescription drugs or that I am minimizing the seriousness of the prescription drug epidemic. Lots of middle class people are on prescription drugs but I have anecdotally noted that in addition to the poor, who are somewhat accurately stereotyped as being the primary victims of drug addiction, wealthy people are more likely to be addicted to medication than people in the middle class. It does seem like big pharma has done a lot in the last ten years to fill in the middle too though.
An older member of my close family (a retired 40 year elementary school teacher and church lady) very nearly died this summer as an indirect result of being on more prescription drugs than any of us were aware of. She has a small benign inner ear tumor that we have blamed for her having balance problems and for years she has taken occasional falls but she had two of them close enough together that she insisted on going to the hospital where she became irrational, her blood pressure got out of control, terrible incontinence including GI bleeds, everyone thought there was a real chance she would die despite what few problems her blood work revealed being quickly stabilized.
After about eight weeks under 24 hour care (including what in hindsight was a very strategically timed steroid injection) she is better than she has been in years. None of her doctors even once mentioned the word "addiction" they just went over her medication list and crossed a bunch of them off. None of her "friends" seemed willing to talk about it with her either or was left up to her family. I hope we got the message through to her and she will avoid that doctor, a doctor who has been a well known and respected local practitioner for decades.
