National Prescription Drug Take Back Day October 29

Law enforcement, public health, and environmental professionals stand united in support of medication take-back programs, such as the DEA’s take-back event on Saturday, October 29, as the safest and most responsible way to dispose of old and leftover medicines.  Take-back programs are one way to prevent youth prescription drug abuse.

In our community, the North Precinct will be collecting unused medications on October 29, 10:00 a.m to 2:00 p.m. as part of the DEA's national take-back day.  Other Seattle Police precincts are also participating.  In addition to these one-day drop-off sites, local Bartell Drugs and Group Health sites take back medicines all of the time.


In Washington State, the Take Back Your Meds Coalition is advocating for a permanent, state-wide take-back program.  Drug manufacturers are in a unique position to take responsibility and pay for take-back programs as a cost of doing business, just as they already do in other countries. For a couple of pennies per prescription or bottle of cold pills, drug companies could finance and provide a safe ongoing medicine take-back system for our state.

In Olympia, big PHARMA has worked hard to dodge taking responsibility. Sadly, pressure from PHARMA stalled action in the WA Legislature last year. Luckily, this year our representatives again have a chance to pass a bill to create a state wide medicine take-back system by requiring companies selling medicines in the state to provide the program as part of doing business.

Prevention WINS awarded AMA Foundation grant

In partnership with Seattle Children’s Hospital, Prevention WINS was awarded a grant from the American Medical Association (AMA) Foundation’s Healthy Living Program.  The $5,000 grant will be used to expand the Prevention WINS social marketing campaign and parent education program for Eckstein Middle School families. The project’s goal is to provide parents with the support they need to prevent substance abuse, including prescription drug abuse, among their children.

The AMA Foundation's Healthy Living Program addresses critical healthy lifestyle issues by providing mini-grants to grassroots community organizations.  This year, the foundation is funding projects targeting youth and addressing the topics of nutrition and physical fitness, prescription drug safety and violence prevention. Prevention WINS is one of 37 nonprofits across the country that received this grant this year.  

Prescription drug take-back campaign notes

The local Take Back Your Meds campaign holds monthly coordinating conference calls and here are my notes from today's call --

-- The DEA is hosting another prescription drug take-back event on October 29.  This will probably be the last or second-to-last nationwide event, with the last one possibly to be held in early 2012, since new federal legislation will allow for take-back programs without DEA involvement. 

-- "Extended producer responsibility", including the responsibility of pharmaceutical companies to be stewards of their products after they are sold, was the topic of a panel discussion during the National Conference of State Legislators earlier this month.  The only non-industry panelist was from the Product Policy Institute and he blogged about his experience. 

Take back your meds bookmarks

Just in time for National Night Out neighborhood events, the local Take Back Your Meds campaign has made available bookmarks promoting prescription drug take-back programs. 

 

Preventing prescription drug abuse among adolescents

Join Together recently interviewed a nationally recognized scholar on prescription drug abuse and adolescents.  Following are some excerpts from that interview:

In response to a question about why prescription drugs are becoming a problem among teens:

It is not entirely clear why prescription medication misuse and abuse has increased, while other forms of drug use have decreased. However, several issues appear to be interacting to create this problem. These include: increased availability due to increases in prescribing controlled medications to adolescents; perceptions that prescription drugs generally are safer than street drugs; changing attitudes toward the use of medications because of direct-to-consumer marketing (DTC) and the Internet, where adolescents can quickly learn about medications and how to use them to self-treat and get high.

In response to a question about the role parents play in preventing prescription drug abuse:

I believe that parental monitoring is the “key” to reducing the nonmedical use of prescription medications in ages 12 to 17 years. Our data show that general parental supervision is associated with lower rates of marijuana, alcohol and tobacco use; however this is not true for the nonmedical use of prescription medication. We speculate reasons for this: (1) parents are unaware of the potential problem and do not supervise the storage of controlled medications (and thus, they are available to household members) and (2) parents engage in nonmedical use and do not consider it a problem.

In response to a question about the challenges of preventing prescription drug abuse in comparison to preventing illegal drug abuse:

This question is difficult to answer because of a lack of prospective data. It is well established that illicit drug use moves in social and behavioral patterns, with individual drugs gaining and losing popularity among adolescents. However, this ebb and flow is not true for alcohol, which remains a very popular substance.

Because prescription medications share social characteristics with alcohol (e.g. legal for certain groups, relatively safe in small doses, etc.), nonmedical use may be more similar to alcohol misuse/abuse. Our society promotes the legal use of both alcohol and controlled medications; we are one of a very few countries that allow the television marketing of controlled medications.