We’ve all heard the horror stories of parents who have had to deal with a child struggling with addiction, stealing to support a habit, or perhaps worse, dying from an accidental overdose or drug-induced suicide.

But the drug epidemic of this generation is not heroin, cocaine, or methamphetamine. It is prescription medications. This epidemic is senseless, tragic and preventable.

Today, throughout our state 2,500 kids between 12 and 17 experimented with prescription pain killers for the first time. Tomorrow another 2,500 will do the same thing. To put that in perspective, that’s 44 school buses full of kids, every day.

Today, in our state there was at least one death from a prescription drug overdose. There will continue to be one death each day from a similar overdose.

In 1999, over 16,000 people died of prescription drug overdoses. In 2009, it was over 37,000—a 131 percent increase.

By the time our kids reach their senior year of high school, one in five of them will have abused prescription medications; and over 40 percent of those will have obtained the medications from their family medicine cabinet, not from a drug dealer, not from a friend—from Mom and Dad, Grandma or Grandpa, or some other family member.

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The statistics are staggering; it’s overwhelming to think that our life-saving and -sustaining drugs are being abused in such a way. Prescription drug abuse truly is a complex problem, and there is no silver bullet to solve it.

But in Arkansas, we are taking action to address the issue of prescription drug abuse.

State Drug Czar Fran Flener, who works tirelessly to educate about this epidemic, with Attorney General Dustin McDaniel and the Arkansas State Police, have launched the “Monitor, Secure, Dispose” campaign. Its purpose is to educate Arkansans that they have a duty to guard their medications, to make sure they don’t share their medications, and to properly dispose of them once they are done with their treatment.

In Benton, Chief Kirk Lane got tired of going on police calls that involved teenagers overdosing on prescription medications. So he started the first prescription “take back box” to allow citizens of Saline County to return their unwanted or unused medications. This has led to numerous Prescription Drug Take Back Events across the entire state. To date, over 32 tons of prescription drugs have been returned at these events.

Local civic organizations such as Rotary Clubs have recognized the epidemic and have piggy-backed on efforts by the state and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to give take back efforts a wider reach. Rotary Club 99 in downtown Little Rock has recently donated money to purchase additional permanent drug take-back boxes throughout the state.

Several years ago, after seeing problems begin to develop in other states, our legislature passed a law that banned the Internet prescribing of controlled substances for patients in Arkansas in the absence of a valid “Physician-patient” relationship. In 2011, the Arkansas General Assembly passed the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP), a data repository of all controlled substances that are dispensed in Arkansas. This program has been active since May 2013 and provides a useful tool to prescribers and dispensers to determine if a patient is seeking controlled substances from multiple prescribers and multiple pharmacies.

The PDMP is voluntary; by October 2013, 1185 physicians and 1350 pharmacists had signed up to use the database. From September 2012 to August 2013, over 7 million controlled substance prescriptions were dispensed, just in Arkansas.

While these efforts have been successful, we have to continue to have a multi-faceted approach to solve this problem. We must continue to:

  • Educate ourselves and our communities.
  • Protect our medications at home.
  • Dispose of unwanted or unneeded medications during Drug Take-Days in April and October 2014.
  • Encourage responsible prescribing and dispensing of prescription medications.
  • And, encourage prosecutors to aggressively prosecute pharmacy robberies and burglaries that intend to dump thousands of doses of drugs onto our streets.
  • And finally, we also need to realize for some of these abusers, it is an addiction. We must help those struggling to overcome prescription pain killer addictions.

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Scott Pace, Pharm.D., J.D. is Chief Operating Officer of the Arkansas Pharmacists Association and co-owner of Kavanaugh Pharmacy in Little Rock with his wife Anne, also a pharmacist. They have a daughter, age three, and a son, age two.