Someone recommended that I view a potential training video on drug abuse. The drug profiled in the documentary was OxyContin. OxyContin is a very powerful painkiller that mimics the effects of opium and can be highly addictive. The documentary (found on YouTube under “OxyContin Express”) is broken up into five segments and profiles one user while depicting the powerful addictiveness of this drug.

Prescription drug abuse is this nation’s fastest growing drug problem. It has become such a problem that the Obama Administration announced a plan to fight prescription drug abuse, warning that accidental fatal overdoses now exceed the deadly overdoses from the crack epidemic of the 1980s and black tar heroin in the 1970s combined. According to a study by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, there was a fourfold increase nationally in treatment admissions for prescription painkiller abuse during the last decade. The increase spans every age, gender, race, ethnicity, education, employment level, and region. Accidental drug overdoses are now the leading cause of accidental death in 17 states, ahead of car crashes.

Education of doctors in the proper prescription of this and other powerful drugs is essential to combating abuse. Also important is the adoption by every state of a drug monitoring program which allows a prescriber to tap into a database to see whether a patient has several narcotic prescriptions (currently only 35 states have such a database). The documentary mentioned above profiles Florida, which (at the time of the documentary) had no such database. Strip malls throughout the state are set up as pain clinics, many of which dispense their own medications.

Most people that are prescribed OxyContin use the medication for very legitimate purposes, but some do not. I write this column just to educate you to be aware that most drug abuse starts for legitimate reasons, and that illegal drugs are not the big problem. The number one drug abused worldwide is alcohol. Why? Because of its availability. Prescription drugs are being abused more and more for the same reason.

For the last two years, we have hosted a one-day drug drop-off program. Most recently, Apr. 30 was the date you could bring in your unwanted or expired drugs, no questions asked, for disposal. Well, beginning in July 2011, you will be able to drop off any expired or unused household medicines for disposal at neighborhood pharmacies and police stations throughout San Francisco. For more details on this year-round program, visit www.SFEnvironment.org or call 415-355-3700.

If you dispose of your expired, unused or unwanted medicines, they won’t end up in the wrong hands or in landfills.

On another note, there seems to be an uptick in car break-ins; coincidentally, there seems to be an increase in people leaving very valuable items in their cars including purses, wallets, iStuff, cell phones, cameras, laptops, GPS devices, etc. (I am serious, I read the reports). Please, please don’t leave anything in your parked car, and tell others the same thing.

Thank you and be safe out there.

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