the mission of the national council on patient information education, ncpie, is to stimulate and improve communication of information on safe and appropriate medicine use to the general public and health care professionals. "thank you for inviting the national council on patient information education, ncpie; that's how i'm going to refer to us today." one of our key programs right now is called the "teen influencer" program. the full title is "maximizing your role as a teen influencer: what you can do to prevent teen prescription drug abuse." that program enables adults in the community to access and download and then use for community outreach purposes a whole range of materials to help get the word out in a consistent way about prevention and treatment options related to teen prescription drug abuse. as medication use becomes more prevalent in our society for all ages, so too becomes the need to improve the communication about those medicines between the clinicians-the doctors, the pharmacists, other prescribers-and the patient and their support network. samhsa's been a tremendous reso

all the wonderful resources that we have, whether they're at aarp or the national council on patient information and education, all come down to helping people get the most value from their medicines. so if i go to a gathering, it could be a party of one or it could be a party of a thousand, and people ask me what i do and i tell them, automatically that triggers "oh, my mother's taking a lot of medications," or "my son's having a problem with..." so it creates an opportunity to help and serve. so we've already established that over-the-counter medications are accessible and that youth are in particular risk of accessing these drugs. and, what has been done or what can be done to help us deal with this problem. beverly? we need to make sure parents are aware that this is really an issue and a concern for their youth and that we have community groups in schools and different organizations bring that up. because i think parents, it's kind of under their radar. they're looking for illicit drugs; they're kind of thinking about that and watching for their children, but they're not paying attention to the packages