Xanax Abuse Becomes More Prevalent on Ole Miss Campus

Image credit: medscape.com

The abuse of anti- anxiety drugs is becoming a bigger problem on school campuses everywhere. After a post on the Odyssey went viral, conversation about the abuse of the medication grew.


Dr. Phil Baquie of the Oxford Counseling Center says that Xanax, in particular, is the most popular thing he things on the Ole Miss campus. He says that this medication is very easy to find without a prescription and it is even fairly easy to obtain a prescription.

"All you really need to do is go online and look up traits of anxiety or you could even figure out the diagnostic criteria for anxiety online and technically therapists could just go through a checklist," Dr. Baquie said.

He says that it is important for the therapist to be able to look at other characteristics of the client to differentiate between clients suffering from the illness or clients simply looking to score some medication.

"Fidgeting or physically trembling and just being able to look at the visual cues the person's body is physically giving," he said.

According to DrugAbuse.gov, over 60,000 people are addicted to anti-anxiety medication. There are close to 48 million people in the United States with Xanax prescriptions and over 6 million people have used it illegally in the past year. 26 percent of these people are ages 18-26.

Emily Xie has more on the abuse of Xanax on college campuses and on the Ole Miss campus: