SACRAMENTO, California — October 25, 2016 —Safer Lock’s new commercial drives home the importance of locking up prescription medications.
The ads for Safer Lock combination locking prescription bottles air on the DISH Network and Fox News Network reaching more than 17 million households, starting October 18, 2016. In the hard-hitting spots, addiction expert Erica Spiegelman cites a grim statistic, “Over 40% of teens have abused a drug stolen from their own parent’s medicine cabinets.”
Opioid abuse has reached epidemic levels in the United States. According to the Center for Disease Control, prescriptions for Opioids have dramatically increased from 112 million in 1992 to nearly 249 million in 2015.
No one knows better than Steven Simpson the reason Safer Lock was originally developed. At the age of 14, Steven began stealing his mother’s pills when she was prescribed pain medication after a life-threatening accident. Within 4 years he had become a full-blown addict, with his abuse escalating to meth and heroin. While Steven has successfully recovered from his addiction others are not so fortunate. In fact, from 1999 to 2014, more than 165,000 people died in the United States from prescription-opioid overdoses.
Sandy Hancock, VP of Sales at Gatekeeper Innovation (the maker of Safer Lock), stresses the importance of raising awareness about the risk of denial and complacency. “A threat to children and teens exists inside their own homes. Many people can’t image their child or grandchild stealing their medications,” says Hancock, adding, “But it happens, even to good kids, star athletes, and straight-A students.”
While awareness and laws for reducing the number of prescriptions are on the rise, few solutions exist that address the problem at the point of access. Safer Lock, a product of Sacramento-based Gatekeeper Innovation, is a four-digit (10,000 possibilities) combination locking cap developed to help prevent unauthorized access to prescription medication. The combination can be set to the user’s personal preference. The locking cap comes with its own bottle but also fits a wide variety of prescription bottles with a 38mm opening.
Safer Lock also helps ensure that young children aren’t accidentally poisoned by powerful medications. Unlike childproof caps, a combination cap cannot be twisted off by a determined toddler. At the same time, Safer Lock has been tested and certified as easier for seniors to twist open than a childproof cap.
