(CNN) -- The coffee mug is
covered in a prescription label, with the RX#: VRY-CAF-N8D.
"Drink
one mug by mouth, repeat until awake and alert," the instructions read.
The mug
is one of several Urban Outfitters prescription-themed products that
have come under fire recently from safety advocates who say the items promote
the misuse and abuse of painkillers.
"In
the 20,000 products that comprise our assortment, there are styles that
represent humor, satire, and hyperbole," Urban Outfitters said in a
statement. "In this extensive range of product we recognize that from time
to time there may be individual items that are misinterpreted by people who are
not our customer. As a result of this misinterpretation we are electing to
discontinue these few styles from our current product offering."
The move
comes after several groups sent letters to the retailer asking it to stop
selling the prescription line.
On
Monday, Marsha Ford, president of the American Association of Poison Control
Centers, wrote to Urban Outfitter CEO Richard Hayne on behalf of her
organization.
"Local
poison centers experts know firsthand the dangers of medicine abuse and misuse.
In 2011, they managed 209,909 cases of exposures to painkillers. Of those,
21,752 were teens ages 13 to 19," the letter said. "Products such as
these minimize the dangers of medicine abuse and misuse and are very
dangerous."
Ford's
letter followed an earlier one sent by the attorneys general of 22 states and
Guam that also urged Urban Outfitters to cease sales of glasses, coasters,
mugs, drink holders and other prescription-related products.
"There
is a national health crisis related to the abuse and diversion of prescription
drugs," the chief legal officers wrote. "We are actively engaged in a
campaign of environmental change to educate the public that abuse of
prescription drugs is not safe simply because the medication
originated from a doctor. By putting these highly recognizable labels on your
products, you are undermining our efforts."
One
person dies from a drug overdose every 19 minutes in the United States,
according to the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention; about half of those deaths involve prescription
painkillers. In fact, accidental overdoses have surpassed car crashes as a
leading cause of American accidental deaths.
One
doctor described it to Dr. Sanjay Gupta as the biggest man-made epidemic in the
United States.
"Distribution
of morphine, the main ingredient in popular painkillers,increased 600% from 1997-2007,"
Gupta later wrote in an op-ed for CNN.
"In the United States, we now prescribe enough pain pills to give every
man, woman and child one every four hours, around the clock, for three
weeks."
CNN's
Maxwell Newfield contributed to this report
Source: www.cnn.com
