The Drugs in Our Cabinets

Jacob Hamilton Garrett had been missing for a month when his body was found last March slumped against a tree in a wooded area behind an auto shop, where an employee was installing a fence.

Jacob was 14 years old. A 7th grader at Whitehouse Junior High.

“Jacob was a teenager who was trying to experiment with pills,” said his sister, Robin Hukill Potter, in a Facebook post. “Jacob took a couple meds that you cannot mix. He didn’t know that you couldn’t mix those meds.”

Teenagers are killing themselves with the medicine we leave in our cabinets.

“Deaths from drug overdose have been rising steadily over the past two decades and have become the leading cause of injury death in the United States,” according to the Center for Disease Control website. “Every day in the United States, 114 people die as a result of drug overdose, and another 6,748 are treated in emergency departments for the misuse or abuse of drugs. Nearly 9 out of 10 poisoning deaths are caused by drugs.”

"It's a very serious issue, it is on the rise," said David Davis, Pharmacist, at Good's Medicine Chest in Tyler in a KETK article. "Your teens believe that prescription drug abuse is safer than abusing illegal or street drugs, which is wrong, they're both dangerous drugs … Teens feel like it's not illegal to abuse prescription drugs, when in fact it is illegal to abuse a prescription drug or take a prescription drug that's intended for someone else."

So one of the goals of the East Texas Substance Abuse coalition is to raise money to purchase an incinerator for the Smith County Sheriff's Department, so area residents can safely dispose of their unused prescription drugs (flushing your pills down the toilet contaminates the water supply). Click here to learn more and to donate.