Kentucky Attorney General talks to students about prescription drug abuse

By Staff Writer

Experts say that curbing prescription drug use at the middle and high school level may help aid the country's problem with the substance.

In an effort to facilitate discussion and prevention methods, Kentucky's Attorney General, Jack Conway, recently delivered a message about the dangers of prescription drug abuse to student in Boyd County Middle School.

"Overdose deaths have quadrupled in this area in the last four years. We are losing more young people to overdose deaths from prescription pills than we do in traffic accidents," Conway told the news source.

Conway has teamed up with Mike Donta, who lost his child to prescription drug overdose in 2010. Together, they gave Boyd Middle School students information about the effects of drug use.

Motivating teens to make the right choices may be difficult, but parents can enroll their child in therapeutic boarding schools to give them individual therapy if they are addicted to opiate drugs such as Vicodin and OxyContin.

According to the 2009 Monitoring the Future Survey, approximately 15.4 percent of students between grades eight and 12 used prescription drugs recreationally in the year prior to the study.