There's a bill circulating through the house to help prevent teens from abusing prescription drugs.
“You know my grandma would leave her pills out, you know my dad, whoever and I had ready access, you know they were, they were always available to me”, said recovering addict Amanda Becker.
An availability Becker said opened the gateway to her heroin addiction.
“It started out with umm prescription pain killers”, said Becker.
“Like vicodin, umm and then as time went on it went to oxycodone, oxycontin, and then to heroin.”
The new bipartisan bill is aimed to deter young people from having access to prescription drugs by requiring opioids and other Schedule II drugs to be sealed in a lockable vial.
“From a prevention side, I think it's a great idea”, said Corey Warren from RISE Recovery Community in Lansing.
“I think anything that we can do to keep opioid prescriptions locked up, out of the hands of our youth…I think it’s a positive.”
Legislation that some recovering abusers say could have saved them from spiraling deeper into substance abuse.
“If my family members that had prescriptions that I would want to take in place of my own and if there was a lock on the bottle, I definitely wouldn't have gone to the streets because”, said Amanda Cunningham who is recovering from a heroin addiction.
“I was only 16. You know, who goes out to the streets at 16”, Cunningham continued.
