Wood County Prevention Coalition
Uniting For A Drug-Free Community Since 2004
Newsletter for Dec 18, 2018 Vol. #4 Issue #19
Prescription for a healthy holiday and tips to safeguard your medicines
Special Editorial by Judson Haims The Aspen Times Dec 17, 2018
For many people, the holiday season means extra visits with family and friends, creating fun memories, sharing traditions and enjoying the warm glow of family.
With all the decorating and activities, it's easy to let safety slip off your to-do list. But this is an excellent time to make sure powerful medicines don't fall into the wrong hands.
Non-medical use of prescription drugs is a serious and growing problem in the United States. You'd have to be living under a pretty big rock on a remote island in the middle of the ocean not to be aware of the opioid epidemic in our country. According to a report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Data Archive, prescription pain medications are the third-most common substance implicated in pediatric poisonings.
For older children, those in high school, it is estimated that almost 20 percent have misused prescription drugs. Sadly, 43 percent of the children admitted to hospitals for opioid overdose ended up in ICU. Young adults between the ages of 25 and 44 make up for about half of all overdose death from opioids.
It's not just opioids that are wreaking havoc on our society, it's any and all misuse of prescription drugs. Drug addiction crosses all age groups, and it often starts with prescription medicines that have been liberated from the medicine cabinets of family and friends.
While locking up your medications may be one of the best deterrents to medication theft, education may take the forefront and ultimately be more effective. Most teens and young adults do not realize, or are able to comprehend, the devastating consequences of drug abuse.
Whom to trust: It is not just the medicine cabinets at home that should be monitored this holiday season, but those at grandma's and grandpa's. A few missing pills here and there could be from the innocent son or daughter you'd never suspect. It also could be the cleaning person, a house guest, a visitor or even a neighbor. Unfortunately, theft of prescription medication can be committed by anyone who has unfettered access to the home. The problem is so widespread that even trusted medical or home care personnel could be responsible.
You need to be vigilant about knowing the quantities and location of your meds. Regular monitoring of the medicines in your home can save a life.
Be aware of meds in the home: Make a list of all the medication in your home. You must be diligent to know what's in your house and account for all your medications. Counting pills and making a list will help ensure that none are missing.
While you may think that nobody may be interested in the Valium, Xanax, Ritalin or sleeping pills such as Ambien, Sonata and Lunesta that have been in your medicine cabinet for ages, these medications can be traded for other medication such as Oxycodone, Vicodin and other opioids.
Lock them up: Keep all medicines and over-the-counter items — especially cough syrup, sleep aids and motion sickness medicine — locked up, or move them to a place where they won't be easily found.
Check around your home for old medicines: Purses, coat pockets, kitchen cupboards, bureau drawers and hall closets are common places to find old medicines.
Travel tip: If you take prescriptions with you when staying in someone else's home, quietly ask your host or another trusted adult to lock them up or find a secure place to store them. Suitcases and purses are not safe places to keep powerful prescriptions.
Clean house: Sort through all your medicines and get rid of old or unused ones. The label will tell you how to dispose of them. Before you put them in the trash, mix them with something that tastes bad, like cat litter or old coffee grounds, and then put them in a sealed bag or old container and place it in the trash. (Most medicine should not be flushed because it gets into creeks, rivers, and even our water system.)
For local drug disposal options in Wood County, please see the flyer below
Youth Mental Health and Suicide Prevention
It’s a small thing to reach out and ask a simple question. It can come from a friend or classmate, a teacher or coach, a neighbor or someone at church, but it can make a world of difference to a young person considering suicide.
“I’m worried about you. Are you OK?”
Suicide is the second leading cause of death among youth between the ages of 15 and 24. In Kentucky, 8 percent of Kentucky high school sophomores – that’s 1 in every 12 students – say they attempted suicide in 2015.
On KET’s Connections, host Renee Shaw explored youth suicide prevention with licensed clinical psychologist Julie Cerel, a professor at the University of Kentucky College of Social Work and president of the American Association of Suicidology. She also spoke with Courtney Parr, a college student who got treatment for her depression and now helps others considering suicide.
Courtney Parr describes it as a tape playing in her head. The recording said members of her family never graduate high school, they die at an early age from drug addiction, and that she was destined to a similar fate.
Life for Parr was indeed difficult. She never knew her father, and her mother overdosed in 2007. Parr shuffled through different foster homes, some good, some bad, and she battled depression. Yet she still knew she wanted change the script that played in her head.
Parr did make it to college, but the peer pressure of fitting in led to a panic attack. That’s when a friend in her dorm asked the simple question: Are you OK?
“I said, I don’t know. I feel like I’m going crazy,” Parr recalls.
The next day, Parr asked her boyfriend’s mother for help. She was able to get Parr into treatment and on the path to recovery.
“Now I can tell other people I went through this depression, I felt I was about to die or I needed to,” says Parr. “I was just going through all these emotions and didn’t know how to explain them or express them or who to talk to.”
Psychologist and UK professor Julie Cerel says it’s important for young people to hear stories like the one Parr has to tell.
“The vast majority of people that attempt suicide and survive, go on to live lives that don’t end in suicide,” Cerel says. “This whole message of hope that even when people get to the point where they’ve attempted to end their lives, they can be hopeful and they can lead a great life.”
Getting the word out to young girls is especially important, says Cerel, because the suicide death rate for that demographic has been increasing over the last decade. She says a number of factors may be at play, including bullying, substance abuse and drug addiction, easy availability firearms and other lethal means, media depictions that glamorize suicide, and lack of access to mental health care.
About half of adults in the commonwealth know someone who has taken their own life, according to Cerel. She says it’s a myth that committing suicide is a good way to seek revenge against those who have wronged you.
“The reality is there’s never anyone left behind after a suicide who is OK with it,” says Cerel. “People grieve forever.”
Kentucky has been proactive at trying to prevent suicides among young people, Cerel says. The state has received several federal grants to train mental health professionals as well as teachers and other school personnel how to recognize a change in student’s behavior and intervene with a potentially suicidal child.
“It’s amazing that Kentucky is one of only a handful of states that has a requirement for mental health providers, social workers, psychologists, counselors to have specific training in suicide assessment and treatment,” she says. “But we need to go further and make sure that the training that therapists get is good training and evidenced-based training.”
Cerel encourages all adults to be on the look out for a good student or athlete who suddenly doesn’t care about his or her performance. Other indicators can be a young person who experiences a relationship break up or starts to give away prized possessions.
If a child talks about harming him or herself, a friend or adult should act immediately. Cerel recommends calling the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.
Teen Vaping Soared In 2018
December 17, 2018
by Rob Stein NPR
There's yet more disturbing news about kids vaping nicotine.
Vaping jumped dramatically again among high school students between 2017 and 2018.
In fact, it was the biggest one-year spike of any kind in the 44 years the Monitoring the Future survey has been tracking substance abuse by young people.
"It is very worrisome," says Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which funds the survey. "We are very concerned about the increase in vaping."
The proportion of high school seniors who reported vaping nicotine in the last month rose to 20.9 percent in 2018, a nearly 10-percentage-point increase from 11 percent in 2017, according to results released Monday.
The increase was twice as large as the previous record for a year-over-year increase in vaping by 12th-graders, the researchers say.
Younger kids are increasingly vaping too, according to the findings, which were published online by the New England Journal of Medicine.
Among 10th-graders, nicotine vaping climbed at a record rate — doubling from 8 percent to 16 percent. That's the largest percentage-point increase ever recorded by the survey for vaping within the last 30 days for that grade.
The combined jumps in vaping by 10th- and 12th-graders was a record-setter for the survey, which has been underway since 1975.
The percentage of 8th-grade students vaping in the past 30 days increased too — from 3.5 percent to 6.1 percent.
The increases, based on a representative sampling of 13,850 high school students nationwide, translate to about 1.3 million more adolescents vaping in 2018, the researchers said.
"The policies and procedures in place to prevent youth vaping clearly haven't worked," said Richard Miech of the University of Michigan, who led the study. "Because the vaping industry is quickly evolving, new additional, vaping-specific strategies may well be needed in the years ahead in order to keep vaping devices out of the hands of youth."
Vaping involves the use of electronic cigarettes. Instead of burning tobacco like traditional cigarettes, e-cigarettes heat up a fluid containing nicotine, generating a vapor laced with the potent drug. While the devices are believed by many to be safer than traditional tobacco cigarettes, they are far from harmless.
The vapor produced by e-cigarettes deliver very high levels of nicotine, raising fears about the impact on the sensitive, developing brains of young people, and hooking a new generation on the potent drug.
The findings mirror the latest results from the National Youth Tobacco Survey, which also found a dramatic increase in vaping. Those findings helped prompt the Food and Drug Administration to announce plans to restrict the sale of flavored electronic cigarettes, which appeal to children.
Critics have been urging the FDA to get even tougher on e-cigarettes.
Another disturbing finding in the new survey is that more teens say they are inhaling "just flavoring" when they vape, increasing fears many adolescents don't realize they are inhaling high levels of nicotine.
The percent of 12th-graders who said they only vaped flavoring in the past year increased to 25.7 percent in 2018, up from 20.6 percent in 2017. The most popular e-cigarettes do not have nicotine-free options.
Twenty-four Hour, Seven Day-a-Week Safe Drug Disposal Options in Wood County (with downloadable pdf below)
Season's Greetings from the Wood County Prevention Coalition!
Wood County Prevention Coalition Community Meeting
Friday, Mar 22, 2019, 08:30 AM
Wood County Educational Services, Research Drive, Bowling Green, OH, USA
RSVPs are enabled for this event.
About Us
Our Vision: Helping youth be drug-free, productive and responsible citizens.
Our Mission: We are a coalition of compassionate community members working together to coordinate high quality programs for the prevention of youth substance abuse in Wood County.
Email: mkarna@wcesc.org
Website: wcprevention.org
Location: 1867 Research Drive, Bowling Green, OH, United States
Phone: (419)-354-9010
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WCPCoalition
Twitter: @woodpccoalition