How to fend off the next drug crisis

Doctors worry that a second drug epidemic is on the horizon, according to a recent survey. We’re still amid the opioid crisis, but 62 percent of the primary care physicians queried say it’s likely to morph into a whole new emergency, this time fueled by prescription drug misuse.

Physicians in that survey, conducted by the Center on Addiction and Quest Diagnostics, were focused on people in chronic pain who, deprived of opioids, may find relief by turning to other prescription drugs such as benzodiazepines like Valium. That’s a critical concern, but there’s another important issue that requires our urgent attention: Too many teens and young adults don’t understand that the drugs we count on to treat our medical problems can be dangerous if misused.

The nation already has a significant prescription drug problem. In 2017, an estimated 18 million people took someone else’s medication, used a previously prescribed drug for a different purpose or otherwise misused them. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, this behavior is most common among young people of college age and slightly older.

But high schoolers are also vulnerable — about 15 percent of high school seniors report having misused prescription drugs. Parents aren’t immune, either. One-third think that ADHD drugs can boost their child’s academic performance, irrespective of whether he or she actually has attention deficit disorder.

These statistics are particularly worrisome because the brain is still developing during adolescence and young adulthood, so drug use at that time can have outsized effects on neural circuits. To make things worse, we know that prescription drug misuse feeds back into our opioid problem: The evidence is strong that someone who misuses prescription drugs is more likely to use illicit drugs, including opioids.

To protect young people, it’s clear that we have to ramp up our efforts to educate families, children and teens, and to make it easy to be smart about prescription drugs.

Health care institutions, schools and community organizations all have roles to play. Northwell Health is collaborating with school districts across Suffolk County to make available a digital prescription drug safety course to all students grades nine through 12, at no cost to educators. Developed by Prescription Drug Safety Network, a public-private coalition committed to empowering Americans to make safe and healthy decisions about prescription drugs, prescription drug safety has reached more than 300,000 students in 3,000 middle and high schools, and almost 100 colleges and universities nationally.

Parents and others in the community are getting involved, too. At October’s Drug Take Back Day, community members cleared their medicine cabinets of unneeded medications that can be a temptation for children looking to experiment. Nearly 442 tons of unwanted or expired drugs were taken out of circulation nationally, with more than 720 pounds of medications collected at Northwell facilities on Long Island.

Prescription drugs are critical in keeping ourselves and our families healthy, but their power means they can cause harm if misused. We must give our children the information they need to use medications appropriately, and teach them strategies so they feel comfortable refusing to participate, or even intervening if their friends or classmates are misusing. And we must act now, as the opioid epidemic finally shows signs of abating, to prevent a tragic second wave.

Sabina Zak is Northwell Health’s vice president of community health and health services research.