AHS Views

Winchester, a New England town, has launched a campaign to protect its citizens from prescription drugs. The Winchester Medication Take Back Program encourages those with prescription drugs in their medicine cabinet to clean them out and turn them in. The idea is to keep drugs out of the water supply and landfills, and to stop young people from experimenting with them - which can lead to the need for addiction help, or worse.

 ”Unfortunately, we’re seeing more young people go down a path that’s difficult to come back from,” Liz Silva of the Substance Abuse Coalition told wbztv.com. The article goes on to say that “drug experimentation is a destructive path that often begins in a medicine cabinet at home. It’s a path that ends with addiction and sometimes death. In Winchester police are seeing teens experimenting with prescription drugs like oxycodone. ”

Winchester is not the only town with the problem - it’s happening all over the U.S.  Kids getting drugs from their parents’ medicine cabinets also sometimes wind up giving them to other kids or taking them to parties where the drugs are dumped into a bowl and everyone just takes what they want. Getting off the drugs can be hard without professional addiction help.

Of course, the kids need to be educated on the dangers of prescription drugs but, in the meantime, making them inaccessible is a good solution. Let’s hope other towns adopt a similar program - there would be a lot less need for addiction help services, and our kids would be safe.