Drug take-back may keep Rx pills out of teen hands
Sunday, October 5, 2008 12:30 AM PDT
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A small Oregon community’s effort to keep commonly abused prescription drugs off the streets looked awfully smart to us when we first learned about it a couple of months ago. It looks even smarter with the recent publication of a national survey showing that a large number of teenagers find it easier to illegally obtain prescription drugs than beer.
The survey, conducted by the National Center on Addiction and Substance abuse at Col-umbia University, asked 17-year-olds which was easier to buy — cigarettes, beer, marijuana or prescription narcotics such as OxyContin, Percocet or Vicodin. Nineteen percent said prescription drugs were easier to purchase than cigarettes, beer or marijuana; that’s up from 13 percent last year. Forty-three percent of the teens said they could obtain prescription drugs in less than an hour.
Significantly, survey officials told The Washington Post that 34 percent of the teens abusing prescription drugs obtained them at home. This suggests to us that the Southwest Oregon community of Winston may have hit upon one of the more effective ways to prevent many of these prescription narcotics from ending up in the hands of teenage drug abusers. It’s an unused pharmaceutical take-back program, which encourages parents to turn their unused prescription drugs over to the town’s police department for proper disposal.
Responsible parents in the community have responded well to the offer. Winston’s police chief reported in July that in the program’s first month citizens brought in enough Vicodin, Oxycodone and other prescription pills to fill a 2½-gallon bucket.
Abuse of prescription drugs among teens is a fast-growing problem here and nationwide. A 2007 study by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy reported that prescription medications are becoming a drug of choice for teenagers.
Prescription drug abuse among Cowlitz County teens is high relative to the rest of the state, according to the state Department of Health’s biennial survey of middle and high school students. The abuse can have deadly consequences. Jeffrey Sullivan, U.S. Attorney for Western Washington, reported last year that 40 people had died in Cowlitz County in the previous 2½ years due to overdoses of prescription drugs. That was more than double the number of deaths due to illegal street drugs over the same period, according to Sullivan.
Cowlitz County might do well to follow Winston’s lead and initiate some sort of unused pharmaceutical take-back program. It would solve this problem of prescription drug abuse among young people. But it might reduce the flow of prescription narcotics from medicine cabinets to the street just a bit.
mhmltn wrote on Oct 6, 2008 5:07 AM:
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