Drug Proofing Your Home?

Pharmaceuticals taken without a prescription or a doctor's supervision can be just as dangerous as taking illicit drugs or alcohol. Some of these drugs have some heavy duty ingredients and that's why they're prescribed for very specific conditions and circumstances.

Painkillers are opioids and coincidentally, so is heroin. If you get wired to something like Oxycontin, which is not terribly hard for some people, there's an excellent chance you'll graduate to heroin. That's not a scare tactic, it's a fact. Oxycontin and heroin produce a similar high, heroin is way cheaper than Oxycontin, and it's much easier to get. A huge number of people that start with pain medication and become dependent end up on heroin and that is not an exaggeration. A huge number.

Prescription medications are prescribed specifically for an individual. What helps one person may seriously harm or kill someone else. Some dosages or per pill milligram weights are designed for someone who has built up a tolerance over time. A "novice" using that prescription could cause themselves serious damage.

Many pills look pretty much the same, but depending on the drug and the dosage, the effects can vary greatly from mild to lethal. Prescription medications, by their very nature, can cause dangerous interactions with other drugs or chemicals in the body.

When you take a medication, it often lowers your normal, healthy level of “inhibition.” What that means is it lowers your standard of judgment, and that’s why so may kids that abuse one drug will mix it with something else. (often alcohol)

Although we showed you some common substances that are abused by kids in the home, they are just a few of many. If your child is determined to get "high" or wasted, realistically you'd have to hide away a great many things in your home, many of them probably sitting in the cupboards of your kitchen or bathroom (ie: Pam non-stick spray, or hair spray.) You'd also have to lock up the gas in the garage, as well as paints, paint thinners and so on.

A more reasonable strategy is to open a dialogue with your kids about drugs and alcohol in general. Few parents have the time or the ability to stand over their kid's shoulder watching their every move so they don't over-dose on drain cleaner. It's much more effective to help them acquire the reasoning tools to enable them to arrive at the right conclusions about substance abuse themselves.

Kids don't respond well when you approach the drug or alcohol issue with scare tactics. That's because at their age, if they're fairly well-adjusted, death is not exactly something they've done a lot of thinking about. So you are far better to stick with facts and real insight to drug and alcohol use. Surprisingly while kids may have more anecdotal information about drugs than you do which they've picked up from their social circle, they won't have many real facts. And typically, they have absolutely no insight into the underlying causes of addiction, or the reality of what recovery is like.

If they've begun regularly to "get wasted" with sedatives, or something else, you have to arrest the behavior - that's a given. But you have to also find out what's going on inside your child that makes reality so unbearable. It's interesting to note that when we talk to kids who have hardly even experimented with drugs or alcohol and we ask them why, in a large percentage of the cases the answer revolves around "not having the time," or that it would "interfere with other things going on in my life." We think there's a lot to learn from those comments.

We also regularly deal with parents who are at their wits end because despite the warning they gave their kids about drugs and alcohol, the kids went out and got in trouble with one or both anyway. And 90% of the time when we ask the parents how their child feels about using drugs and alcohol, they don't really know. Often the parent will reply "Well I assume they think it's okay because they're using them, aren't they?"

And that's the problem - they assume how their child feels, they never really ask. That's because they probably didn't have a discussion about drugs and alcohol, they probably gave a lecture. And the difference is that when you're in a discussion with your child, both you and the child are probably learning something, and when you give a lecture to your child, neither one of you are really learning anything. "Lectures" to kids about drugs and alcohol are really just a warning with more words.

You see, the idea isn't really to drug-proof your home, it's to drug-proof your kids. When you take away the mystery and mystique of drugs and alcohol, they lose a lot of their intrigue for kids. And when you invite your child to share their feelings about the subject, even if you don't like what they have to say, you've at least opened up a precedence for dialogue to actually take place. Talking about feelings creates dialogue, and using scare tactics and threats creates argument.

Just remember, when you interview adults who never got too involved with drugs and alcohol when they were young and you ask them why, it's surprising how many respond by saying something along the lines of, "I was too busy doing something else I enjoyed."