Three steps can help protect teens

By Colleen O'Callaghan-Miele

Thursday, Aug. 28, 2008 | midnight

Over the years, I have lived through several parental fears - fears such as receiving that one dreadful phone call telling me that my child was injured or died, and another from the local police department asking me to come down to the station.

So far I have been spared the worst-of-the-worst calls and, granted, none of the above are appealing, although I choose the latter.

Early last week I called home to check on the boys. My son Joshua answered the phone and began the ritual of telling me Timothy completed his homework and is practicing for his skateboard competition, Christopher did his homework at school and is at football practice and he was preparing chicken and rice for dinner, in addition to baking a cake for dessert. I asked Joshua, "Where is Mark?" Josh’s voice lowered as he said Mark was walking the neighborhood waiting for me to come home. "Why?" I asked. "Well mom, he needs to tell you that a friend died of a drug overdose."

My instant reaction was to get home to be with Mark. My heart reached out to my son and his friend’s family as my stomach soured with instant grief. Without displaying all the saddening details of this youth's death — the bottom line is our friend took too many prescription drugs and he went to sleep as his respiratory system shut down.

Today prescription drugs are the plague of our youth. Why? Because they're free? No, not necessarily. Our kids sell and buy drugs from other kids.

The mindset and what teens say about taking prescription drugs is, "I have a couple of friends with A.D.D. who have prescriptions. One will always have an extra I can bum."

Or, "I take pills to not think about problems, school, girlfriends or anything at the time ... just be in your own state of mind." Or, "They're FDA-regulated, so they have to be a little safer than other illegal drugs."

The good news is there are steps we as parents should take to help protect our kids from prescription drug abuse: monitor, secure and dispose. A site created by Abbott Pharmaceutical and The Partnership for a Drug-Free America shows us how.

According to Abbott and The Partnership for a Drug-Free America, a teen's brain is different than an adult's, and teens are willing to take risks. Teens live in a world of prescriptions and believe that because a doctor prescribes the prescription that it is safe and not dangerous. According to Abbott, 2,500 teenagers nationwide will use a prescription drug to get high for the first time every day. They're accessing these drugs in the comfort of their home; it can be as easy as opening a medicine cabinet.

Abbott and The Partnership for a Drug-Free America state that parents are in an influential position to immediately help reduce our kids' access to prescription drugs because these drugs are found in our home. But how aware are we? Think about this: Would we know if some of our pills were missing? From this day forward, let's make sure we can honestly answer, "Yes."

Here are steps that Abbott and The Partnership for a Drug-Free America have listed on their Not in My House site:

Step 1: Monitor

• Start by taking note of how many pills are in each of your prescription bottles or pill packets.
• Keep track of your refills. This goes for your own medication, as well as for your teen's and other members of the household. If you find you need to refill your medication more often than expected, that could indicate a problem.
• If your teen has been prescribed a drug, be sure you control the medication, and monitor dosages and refills.
• Make sure your friends and relatives - especially grandparents - are also aware of the risks. Encourage them to regularly monitor their own medicine cabinets.
• If there are other households your teen has access to, talk to those families as well about the importance of helping safeguard medications.

Step 2: Secure

• Teens abuse prescription drugs because they are easily accessible and either free or inexpensive. In fact, 64 percent of kids age 12 to 17 who have abused pain relievers say they got them from their friends or relatives, typically without their knowledge. Approach securing your prescriptions the same way you would other valuables in your home: lock them up.
• Tell relatives, especially grandparents, to lock up their medications or keep them in a safe place.
• Talk to the parents of your teenager's friends. Encourage them to secure their prescriptions.

Step 3: Dispose

• Safely disposing of expired or unused prescription medications is a critical step in helping protect your teens.
• Take an inventory of the prescription drugs in your home. Start by discarding expired or unused prescription drugs when your teens are not home.
• Unbelievable though it may seem, teenagers will retrieve discarded prescription drugs from the trash. To help prevent this from happening, mix the medication with an undesirable substance, such as used coffee grounds or kitty litter. Put the mixture into an empty can or bag and discard.
• Unless the directions on the packaging say otherwise, do not flush medication down the drain or toilet.
• To help prevent unauthorized refills and protect your and your family's privacy, remove any personal information from prescription bottles or pill packages before you throw them away.

Our children are precious and depend on us to teach and protect them. The good Lord knows that I will continue to do my very best and, at times, even this will not keep my children out of harm's way and from potentially making a deadly decision. It is at this time, with the loss of our friend, that I choose to share with you not only our loss, but a way that we as parents, family and members of our wonderful community can protect those who are precious to us from obtaining and abusing prescribed drugs.

Colleen O’Callaghan-Miele is the co-publisher of the Home News. She can be reached at 990-2653 or [email protected].