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ASAP’s plan
deserves our support
POSTED: April 26, 2010
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One in five teenagers abuses prescription medication. Sixty
percent of the teens abusing prescription painkillers did so before age 15.
Every day 2,500 teens use a prescription drug to get high for the first
time.
Here's the kicker: Many of these kids get the drugs from the medicine
cabinet or some other location inside their own homes.
The Alliance for Substance Abuse Prevention, or ASAP, wants to do something
about this. The community coalition, designed to prevent substance abuse
among youth and create and promote a healthy lifestyle in Trumbull County,
is sponsoring ''Operation: EMPTY Medicine Cabinet.'' With help from the
Trumbull Ashtabula Group, a law enforcement task force, ASAP is making it
easy for people to rid their homes of potentially dangerous drugs.
From 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on May 12, TAG officers will station themselves in
the parking lot of Trumbull County Waste Management, 5138 Enterprise Drive,
just off the Parkman Road Route 5 bypass exit in Warren, to accept unwanted
medicine.
All people have to do is drive up in their vehicles, hand the medicine
through the window and drive away.
It's environmentally dangerous to dispose of medicine by flushing it down
the toilet or pouring it down a sink. An AP investigation found medicine in
the drinking water of 41 million Americans.
Even throwing medicine out with the trash could harm the environment or
become accessible to a desperate user.
Unwanted medicine is common, whether it's expired or leftover from a patient
who died or a patient who healed before completing the prescription. ASAP
provides us all with some motivation to look through our medicine cabinets
and cupboards to take an inventory and dispose of everything we shouldn't
keep around.
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