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Home » Free Prevention PSAs for Your Community: Preventing Prescription Drug Abuse

Free Prevention PSAs for Your Community: Preventing Prescription Drug Abuse

As you may know, late last year President Obama announced public and private sector efforts to address the prescription drug abuse and heroin epidemic in our country. The Partnership for Drug Free Kids was asked to join this effort by utilizing its Medicine Abuse Project campaign as a vehicle to increase education and awareness around the risks of prescription drug abuse.

Here are just a few stats to reinforce the need to continue educating families about the dangers of Rx abuse:

  • One in four teens has misused or abused a prescription drug in their lifetime.
  • Drug overdoses now exceed car crashes as the number one cause of accidental deaths in the United States.
  • More than 75% of high school heroin users began experimenting further with opiates after first being introduced to prescription painkillers.
  • The CDC reports there were nearly 29,000 opioid involved deaths in 2014. That works out to about 80 each day. They also report a sharp increase in heroin involved deaths and an emerging trend of deaths involving synthetic opioids like fentanyl.

The Partnership is reissuing spots from their nationally recognized Medicine Abuse Project campaign and will be working hard to have these spots air as frequently as possible on stations in Seattle, Yakima, Spokane, and other markets around the country. During 2015, Partnership prevention messages received $210,000 in donated airtime from Washington State media partners.

Here are links to the PSAs that are being distributed to media partners in our three primary markets.  If you would like to work with stations in your community to air these messages, contact deb.schnellman@dshs.wa.gov for more information.

3 parent-targeted Medicine Abuse Project PSAs

Real Help Campaign PSAs