CHPA, CADCA commend OTC cough medicine abuse legislation

NEW YORK The greater awareness raised around the potential of abuse of drugs commonly stored in the consumers’ medicine cabinets among teens, the greater chance of reducing that drug abuse.

According to surveys conducted on behalf of the Consumer Healthcare Products Association and others in the past, when a parent talks to their children about drug abuse, it reduces the chances that that child abuses drugs by some 50%.

And reducing that drug abuse is important, beyond the intent to take a bite out of the number of kids who wind up in the emergency room on account of overdosing. Reducing that drug abuse reduces the chance that ready access to those drugs for its intended purposes will be taken away. It’s initiatives such as this, along with several others like CHPA’s Five Moms Campaign for example, that places the responsibility of reducing teen drug abuse where it should be all along — on the parents.

Without initiatives like this, such common cough-cold products as the cough suppressant dextromethorphan may be placed alongside pseudoephedrine products behind the pharmacy counter. Or worse, DXM products may be reverse switched and available only with a doctor’s prescription. That not only reduces ready access to appropriate medicines, it also doesn’t solve the underlying problem of teen drug abuse.