Posted by Five Mom, Christy Crandell, on Thursday, August 5, 2010
Throughout the summer, each of the Five Moms will be posting a video interview as they share their unique stories that led them to join the campaign. In the first video, Christy Crandell shares her personal journey as a Five Mom and advocate over the past three years and highlights the struggles, success, and future of cough medicine abuse prevention.
I got involved in the Five Moms campaign because it's my passion to educate parents about teen drug and alcohol abuse, specifically cough medicine abuse. As this is what my son was under the influence of when he was arrested for armed robbery three weeks past his 18th birthday.
My family learned about this type of abuse the hard way. And I hope that through my work on Five Moms that no other family will have to experience the pain and the tragedy that my family went through. People can, perhaps, relate to my personal story the best. When they hear my story and see myself and perhaps pictures of my son and think well, they look normal, how could something that tragic happen to them? But it's a reality that many families are facing across our nation.
Well, in order to prevent medicine abuse, you have to know about medicine abuse. And so the way to learn about medicine abuse is to go to our website: stopmedicineabuse.org, and educate yourself, arm yourself with this information, the signs to look for, the type of products that have dextromethorphan in them, which is the active ingredient in the medicine that teens are abusing.
And then I hope that they take the next step, to safeguard their home and to pay attention to what's in their medicine cabinet.
Well, we've got to keep going. We've reached millions of people. And there are millions more for us to touch with this message.
The latest research that has come out, said that this type of abuse has not risen but it's not going down either. So we still have plenty of work in front of us.
So, we thank you for your support at StopMedicineAbuse.
