We get the calls every day. Parents, siblings, grandparents and friends are reaching out to our organization worried that their loved one is abusing prescription medicine.
Prescription drug abuse is an epidemic and is skyrocketing among our nation’s teens. Kids are popping pills at an alarming rate. In fact, prescription medications are now the most commonly abused drugs among 12- to 13-year-olds. Why? Because they are easier for kids to access.
They are becoming addicted to medications that they likely found right in their own homes’ medicine cabinets. In fact, according to our research, two-thirds of teens who abused pain relievers say they got them from family and friends.
At Partnership for Drug-Free Kids, we work to both raise awareness about and reduce prescription drug abuse. Through our national programs like the Medicine Abuse Project, we help parents talk with their kids about medicine abuse, and offer guidance on how to monitor and secure the prescription medications in their homes.
Awareness and monitoring are key to keeping kids from abusing medicine and becoming addicted, but new solutions are emerging that have the potential to help stop addiction before it starts. These include prescription drug monitoring programs, better prescriber education and abuse deterrent formulations.
ADF medications help patients manage pain, but have properties that make them more difficult to alter if used to gain an illicit high. Due to the way these medications are manufactured, they lose their “high” when crushed, injected or manipulated by a potential abuser.
Pharmaceutical companies are applying this new technology to more and more medications, meaning that those who need pain medication will continue to have access to it, while the manufacturers of the medicines are taking an important step to reduce the risk of abuse.
We know that the overwhelming majority of people who are prescribed pain pills are not abusers, but there is a legitimate need for ADF medications to help thwart potential abuse elsewhere in the population.
Last year, Massachusetts was the first state to pass legislation aimed at giving patients greater access to medications with abuse deterrent properties by requiring affordable insurance coverage. Additional states, including Maine, are considering similar legislation this year and it is our hope that lawmakers see this as making strides in the right direction.
While advancements like ADF aren’t the only solution to solving the nation’s prescription abuse problem, it is one common sense approach to potentially help prevent another family from losing a child to addiction.
If we can balance the needs of those living with conditions that require the use of opioid medications, while making the medication tougher to abuse, we may be able reverse the prescription drug abuse epidemic.
Steve Pasierb is president and CEO of the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids, located in New York City.
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