Here's What You Can Do To Keep Prescription Drugs Out Of Drug Abusers' Hands

Did you know what the Surgeon General of the U.S., Dr. Regina Benjamin, called "the nation's fastest growing problem" at a conference this month? Hint: It's not cancer, homelessness, or unemployment. It's prescription drug abuse. Yes, the legal medications the doctor gives you are now being abused in what Dr. Ileana Arias of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes as epidemic proportions. She added that the CDC doesn't use the term "epidemic" lightly either. At the same inaugural National Rx Drug Abuse Summit held on April 12, 2012 in Orlando, FL both women spoke to a crowd of about 700 to address the increasingly growing problem. Dr. Arias told the group that "in 2010, enough prescription painkillers were prescribed to medicate every American adult around the clock for a month." The number of deaths caused by non-medical abuse of prescription drugs is now 15,000 annually at a cost of $72.5 billion in health care costs. Prescription painkillers have gone from 76 million prescriptions in 1991 to 219 million in 2011. Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, and Heath Ledger are just a few of the celebrity deaths who have brought attention to this problem into the living rooms of Americans who were unaware of it. Research shows that the prescription drugs abused are gotten from family and friend in over 70 percent of the cases. Here's what you can do to make sure your medications don't get into the wrong hands. Tomorrow, April 28, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) with the Department of Justice are holding the 4th annual National Prescription Drug Take-Back Day between 10:00 and 2:00 p.m. No questions will be asked and there is no reason to fear arrest. Clean out your medicine chest and put all the expired drugs, extra drugs you didn't need, and any drugs you are not currently taking or expecting to need soon in a bag and drop them off at your local drop-off center for safe disposal. Do not flush them down the toilet, put them down the sink, or throw them away because they will pollute our water supply and landfills with poison. To find out where you can take them in your area go to this Web site and enter your Zip Code or County, City and State: There. No worries any longer about the babysitter or cleaning crew or your kids helping themselves to that leftover Vicodin the dentist gave you. But it's not just painkillers that are abused. Over-the-counter diet pills, prescription stimulants, and psychiatric drugs like tranquilizers, sedatives, anti-depressants, and anti-psychotics are among drugs being abused. You may not think your meds are the type that would appeal to drug abusers, but then you thought bath salts and hand hand sanitizers were only for their primary use and they are now being abused as well.

I am a book junkie.  I currently have approximately 40 books checked out of my local library.  I also buy used and new books.  I obeyed the oft-repeated national demand that everybody must declutter, and a couple of months ago I donated boxes and boxes to a charity.  I also donated a whole U-Haul truck worth to National Write A Novel In A Month in Chicago when they had this great book drive where they had volunteers coming to your house to pick them up. 

Now I am trying to sell them, auction them on Listia (that Web site is a gas),  gave a new one to the library,  and I am throwing more in the new donation boxes I have set up.  Still, you can't walk through this place without falling over books.  I love my books so much I sleep with them.  I have a full size bed but it is so completely covered by the books I'm reading that I nearly fall on the floor at night trying to fit my body onto the very edge of the mattress.

Anybody else out there addicted to reading? 

Anyhow, I have to share titles and authors of some of the extraordinary books the Universe has put in my path to help me grow.  I am expecting Enlightenment soon but am trying not to seek it or be attached to that outcome or, I've read, it doesn't happen.   The following come with my heartfelt hope that you will see a title or two that makes you go to your library, auction, swap or thrift store and look for them.  I am not going to write reviews of each because I'd be up until the sun comes up and also I'd lose what readers I have.  (And I am amazed how many readers I still have considering that I haven't posted in this blog for a while now.  Thank you my favorite, sweet readers for being so patient with me, and I am not speaking to the large worldwide contingent that comes to see the "Naked Hitchhiking" post after searching for God knows what and finding it.)

I'll just give a brief description and perhaps try to entice you into reading these mostly spiritual and inspirational books that are not religious.  There's a big difference, isn't there?

1.  The Simple Faith of Mister Rogers: Spiritual Insights From the World's Most Beloved Neighbor, by Amy Hollingsworth.  Fred was more than my neighbor while I sat in front of the TV with my kids and frowned on their disturbing me while I was getting my calm, wise and good fix for the day.  He was my counselor, spiritual teacher, role model and psychiatrist among other roles.  Just to hear his slow, sincere from the heart voice made all my negative thoughts and feelings vanish for a half hour. 

"Dear God, let some word that is heard be Yours," he would pray before each show, but he never mentioned God or religion on the show.  The book has many testimonials from adults who wrote him to say that he helped them in diverse ways from getting off cocaine to helping them find the motivation to write a long-procrastinated Master's Thesis.  In trying to help improve and grow the self-esteem of children, many adults found that they needed to be told too that he "liked them just the way you are."  Amazing highly evolved human being. 

2.  Herman Hesse My Beliefs:  Essays on Life and Art.  I had been a big fan of Hesse since my teenage years when I was blown away by Steppenwolf and Siddhartha, perfect gifts for the teenager you are or love, BTW.  One of the books I was reading quoted from his essay, "Concerning the Soul," and indicated it was in this collection of which I was not aware.  If you don't read anything else in this book, and, believe me, you'll want to, read this mind-blowing, spiritually transforming work that is right on time for today's human being evolution into a higher stage of consciousness and compassion and love.  (But you really must read his book review of J.D. Salinger's Catcher In the Rye.)



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Not An April Fool's Joke

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