If you read my blogs or just follow current events, you know that prescription drug abuse is reaching epidemic proportions. It is becoming especially alarming among adolescents.
Police say the pervasive problem of prescription pill abuse grows worse by the day. Some children you might think are too young to even consider taking pills are raiding their parent’s medicine cabinet.
Terrifying Revelations
When Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway asks a group of children in the gymnasium at Barrett Traditional Middle School if they know someone who's used a prescription pill for other than its intended use, most of their hands go up.
The next question Conway poses -- "Put them up if you think prescription pills are easy to get" -- receives a similar response.
Those children are just 11, 12, and 13 years old.
The key, like with most drugs, is to never start using. Dr. Karen Shay, a child drug abuse activist, knows the battle personally. Her daughter Sarah started popping pills in high school and died before her 20th birthday: "If I can keep one family from living through the horror that we lived through, it makes it worthwhile and going around and talking to the students has helped me to heal."
Kentucky is the fourth most medicated state in the country and Louisville's seen a 300 percent increase in drug crimes since 2009.
Nationally, one in five teens abuse prescriptions, and for middle schoolers pills are the drug of choice.
As a parent of a middle schooler and one in elementary school, I can tell you this problem frightens me. I know that there are no medications here that my kids and their friends can get into, but the national problem so bad, it scares the heck out of me that other parents are not keeping their kids safe.