What You May Not Know About Locking Medicine Storage

What you may not know about locking medicine storage could be the difference between a life saved and a life ruined.

What you may not know about locking medicine storage could be the difference between a life saved and a life ruined. If you have a single prescription medication, this is the information you need to have.

Locking bottle caps protect children from accidental poisoning

Each year, more than 60,000 kids aged five and under are treated in emergency rooms for medication poisoning. In nearly all cases, the young children got into medication in their own home when a parent or caregiver wasn’t looking. It’s not just your prescription painkillers that can be deadly to a young child, either. Cholesterol lowering drugs, diabetes drugs, and beta blockers can be lethal to children.

A locking bottle cap is more effective than a childproof cap

The childproof caps that come standard on your prescription meds may seem difficult to open for even some adults, but unfortunately, they aren’t keeping your kids out. Even the youngest of tots have demonstrated an ability to open childproof lids in a matter of minutes.

A woman looking at her phone.

Locking prescriptions protects teens from Rx drug abuse

Parents and grandparents need to know: teen use of prescription drugs is on the rise. Teens have easy access to medications in their own homes, and often find prescription drugs in the medicine cabinets of relatives and friends’ homes, too. The increasing epidemic of teen prescription drug use has been attributed to easy access, and a false sense of safety; teens think that prescription drugs are safer than illicit drugs and won’t cause them harm.

Locking up medication helps deter teen addiction

The teen brain is primed for addiction. And if a curious teen takes one or two prescription pills from an easily accessible bottle in your medicine cabinet, it can send them on the path to a lifetime of addiction. By removing the easy access to pills in your home, you can help deter teen addiction.

Different medicine storage options fit different needs

How many prescription medications do you have in your home? How many times a day do you take your pills? Luckily, there are a variety of locking storage options that can fit your specific needs. For some people, a single combination locking cap is a great solution, particularly for pills you access throughout the day, or keep with you in a purse, bag, briefcase, on a counter-top, or in a bedside drawer. For other people, a lock box is the right solution to keep multiple medications, that are only occasionally accessed, out of reach of children. And for some, a combination of both storage options is a good fit. A lock box can hold all of the medications in your home, and the most dangerous (or potentially addictive) pills can be fitted with a locking cap within the medicine lock box.

Locking up your medication won’t keep you out of your Rx

Locking medicine storage may help keep the children and teens in your home out of your medications, but that doesn’t mean it will make it harder for you to get to your pills.

A combination locking cap, for example, uses a personal code that you get to choose. You may choose to use the same 4-digit code for all of your medications. If arthritis or other physical conditions makes a cap difficult to open, you could keep pills in a larger storage box that opens with a key.

Secure medicine storage won’t stop an addict

It is important to note that locking up your meds won’t stop an addict who is determined to get to them. Unfortunately, a locking cap or box can still be forcefully opened in a variety of ways, or even stolen from the premises.

However, if your pill bottle is missing, or you see evidence of tampering or forceful entry, you will know it. If a curious teen sneaks a single pill from an unlocked bottle, you may never know that drug misuse is happening in your home.

Locking your meds is a very strong deterrent to addiction, but it may not keep an existing addict away from your pills completely.

Rx storage options save lives

Every day, more than two-thousand teens misuse a prescription drug for the first time. And every year, drugs kill more people than guns and even car accidents.

If you can keep your teen from curiously experimenting with a prescription drug, you may be saving them from the possibility of addiction, overdose, and death. And that’s not the only way locking up your meds can save lives, either. Medications are the leading cause of child poisoning deaths. Simply by locking up your prescriptions, you can help save your children from becoming statistics. You can help save their lives.

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