Five Moms Fight OTC Abuse

For ages, parents have worried about their children skipping school, drinking alcohol or experimenting with drugs.


Now, they have to worry about what's in their medicine cabinet.

Five mothers from across the nation - including one in Hutchinson - have partnered with the Consumer Healthcare Products Association to fight an alarming trend of teenas abusing cough medicine to get high.

Becky Dyer, a school resource officer with the Reno County Sheriff's Office and a mother of three, was one of the mothers chosen to be a part of the Five Moms Campaign.

Dyer said she started researching the problem earlier this year,
after a 13-year-old Reno County boy nearly died from an overdose on cold medicine.

"When kids abuse cough medicine, they aren't just taking a couple of doses, they're taking the entire box of medicine," Dyer said. "They think since it's an over-the-counter medication and it's in most homes, it won't hurt them."

The healthcare products group, which represents the nation's cough medicine manufacturers, has helped launch the campaign online as well. The association is tracking reports of cough medicine abuse across the country.

According to the educational and interactive Web site, www.fivemoms.com, roughly 10 percent of young people ages 12 to 17 - almost 2.4 million kids - have reported intentionally abusing cough medicine to get high. But only 4 percent of parents believe their children may have abused cough medicine to get high.

The Web site also notes the "high" is caused by consuming a large amount of dextromethorphan, the active ingredient in many over-the-counter cough medicines. Slang names for this ingredient include: Dex, DXM, Skittles, syrup, Tussin, triple-C and CCC.

Virginia Cox, vice president of communications at healthcare products association, said the Five Moms Campaign was formed in part because of activity discovered on the Internet.

"We realized kids were going to the Internet about this issue and getting information about how to abuse cough medicine online," Cox said. "We wanted to create a grassroots campaign to call parents to action."

Teenagers have posted videos promoting abuse of cough medicine on popular social networking sites, including MySpace, YouTube, LiveJournal and Facebook.

Cox said the Five Moms Campaign and the healthcare group have responded with an online campaign that educates parents on substance abuse with medicine and encourages them to talk to their children about the risks of abusing medicine.

The Five Moms Campaign has an awareness video posted on YouTube. Cox said response to the online campaign has been phenomenal, with more than 5,000 hits to the YouTube video.

Cox said parents can go to an online community at Gather.com to talk about the issue with other parents and share ideas on how to combat abuse of cough medicine.

"We've reached millions of parents already in just a month of the campaign," Cox said.

The Partnership for a Drug-Free America encourages teens to "make up your own mind" about DXM by visiting dxmstories.com, where they can get reliable information through medical research, news sources and even other teens who have abused the substance.

Dyer, who works with the D.A.R.E. program in Reno County, said there are plans for awareness on cough medicine abuse to be implemented into the program starting this fall.

Already, Dyer has flown to New York City to appear on the "FOX and Friends" TV show, and she has traveled to Washington, D.C., twice to promote the campaign. She plans to continue to spread the word locally by talking to organizations, including the PTA.

"It's something that's easily overlooked," Dyer said of the potential danger in cough medicine. "Parents need to safeguard what's in their medicine cabinet - to keep their house safe and their children safe."


Cough medicine abuse is a dangerous trend among children and teenagers. Parents can protect their children by ...
Educating themselves and their friends

Communicating with their children

Safeguarding the medicine cabinet

Monitoring their children's online activity

Is your teen abusing cough medicine? Here are some signs to watch for:

Empty cough medicine boxes or bottles in the trash, or boxes and bottles missing from the medicine cabinet

Visiting pro-drug Web sites that provide details on how to abuse dextromethorphan

Changes in friends, physical appearance, or sleeping and eating patterns

Declining grades

Loss of interest in hobbies or favorite activities

Hostile, uncooperative attitude

Unexplained disappearance of household money

Unusual chemical or medical smells on your child or in his or her room

http://www.hutchnews.com/news/regional/sto...pin061707.shtml

[Kalu]

Visiting pro-drug Web sites that provide details on how to abuse dextromethorphan

..yay! that's us! .

[eazyb]

Originally posted by drdªv€@Jun 15 2007, 07:24 AM
Visiting pro-drug Web sites that provide details on how to abuse dextromethorphan

I'll have to call bullshit on this. Who says it's "abuse"? If the kids are going to use it would be better to have information on responsible dexing widely available to them. Censorship and fear mongering just doesn't cut it. Incidentally, for people who drink to get drunk is it automatically labeled "abuse" when the person chooses to not get behind the wheel and place the public at risk? Or how about the chain-smoking nicotine enthusiasts out there?

I've been watching the wheels go around on this. And the big piece of hysteria being propagated is by making the false equality of claiming DXM is an opiate like heroin. Thus, the mere that DXM *IS* heroin is placed in the public's mind.

Propaganda entities and special interest groups/lobbies such as DARE and The Partnership For A Drug Free America (much less the Five Stupid Reactionary Moms) help to disseminate such misinformation in an effort to stir up enough hysteria so that new bodies can be placed within the multi-BILLION dollar recovery treatment system: A system where instead of learning how to quit the users learn to become victims, develop an iatrogenic hypochondria known as "chronic addictive disease" and become ensnared within a pro-addiction religious cult of always-using (euphemized as "relapsing") drugged-up 12-Stepping con artists.

Again, kids will always be kids and sometimes kids do things out of pure curiosity right on down to pure stupidity (just like adults). I'd rather have kids learn to be responsible one way or another for their actions than steered down the therapeutic state's poisonous "primrose" path of personal victimhood. The only thing that needs to be unlearned is an evil societial taboo concerning any victimless and responsible drug use.

I believe that their are more responsible drug users out there than the tiny minority that can't handle their high or are woefully ignorant of a drug's effects (good and bad). I'd rather side with a responsible user than any pathological mouthpiece of the therapeutic state.

[Scynne]

Originally posted by eazyb+Jun 15 2007, 03:05 PM--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (eazyb @ Jun 15 2007, 03:05 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin--drdªv€@Jun 15 2007, 07:24 AM
Visiting pro-drug Web sites that provide details on how to abuse dextromethorphan

I'll have to call bullshit on this. Who says it's "abuse"? If the kids are going to use it would be better to have information on responsible dexing widely available to them. Censorship and fear mongering just doesn't cut it. [/b][/quote]
:thumbsup:
amen brother!

[Kang]

Originally posted by drdªv€@Jun 15 2007, 05:24 AM
medical smells on your child or in his or her room

"Jimmy why do your room smell like lemony freshness and sterile gauze?"

[Professor Jason Farbrain]

Bloody moms. 'Fighting' for a drug-free America? What the hell does that even mean (er, besides the obvious)?!!?

I'm gonna 'fight' for a mom-free America, and I'm gonna get attractive people to adorn my website, not a bunch of uninteresting, square-looking milf rejects.

Excuse me, lacking sleep, brb. :sleepy:

[eazyb]

Originally posted by Homon IV@Jun 17 2007, 05:20 AM
Bloody moms. 'Fighting' for a drug-free America? What the hell does that even mean (er, besides the obvious)?!!?

This WORLD will NEVER be drug free. The only people who have a problem with drugs are those who can't handle their high (the minority composed of chronically ignorant users and the uptight neoprohibitionists).

And, just because I though I was tweakin' pretty good on my dex, I though I was experiencing deja vu. Turns out their talking points are repeated:

http://www.dextroverse.org/forums/index.ph...ST&f=15&t=43604

Didn't I mention that they were a bunch of fascist mindless drones?

As far as the battle of liberty versus fascism continues in my neighborhood (Pittsburgh PA) the neoprohibitionists are crying about their soundly defeated smoking ban. It was rules unconstitutional for one reason: As long as it doesn't harm any other nonconsenting adult or property then it's a victimless "crime".

Coincidentially, the claim is that nicotine is as "addictive" as heroin. Really? If I can quit smoking cold turkey over a decade ago then what's their excuse? And, if I kicked nicotine and it's like heroin then I have the big secret on how to end addiction once and for all.
And DXM is equated with heroin, too, by these know-nothing goosesteppers.

The more I think about it ol' Eazy gets rather uneasy. Such is the price of liberty: Eternal vigilance...

[reaktor]

Lol Reno.

[Arm]

Check out the web site Five Moms.
http://www.fivemoms.com/

Five Moms sounds like the title of a MILF porno. Ide hit all 5 of them! And before I do, ill drink some Nyquil and offer them some.

[Undefined]

See my thread on this:

http://www.dextroverse.org/forums/index.ph...=ST&f=9&t=43972