Teen drug abuse tilting toward prescribed meds
They’re relatively cheap. They’re often acceptable. They’re easy to get. And they’re in the schools.
Prescription drugs. A new high and the new drug of choice for teenagers across America.
In the past 10 years the rate of prescription drug abuse among teens has risen steadily. Nearly one in five — 4.5 million teenagers — admits to abusing medications not prescribed to him or her, reported a 2005 Partnership Attitude Tracking Study conducted by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America.
A wider range of students is reportedly experimenting with and abusing prescription drugs. Even teenagers who aren’t interested in their effects may be robbing the medicine cabinet at home for the cash in the corridors that leftover pain killers, sedatives and sleeping pills can turn over.
Joshua Lyon, 33, author of the book, “Pill Head,” offers: “It’s not like most parents are keeping unused marijuana or cocaine in the medicine cabinet, but they often have old pills they don’t keep track of.”
Teenagers may also be altering dosages on medications that have been prescribed for them; anti-anxiety and sleeping pills are reportedly being prescribed increasingly in this age group. Teens may also be ordering them online through legitimate or rogue pharmacies, by real or invented doctors.
One thing is certain: They’re deadly.
It has been widely reported that many teens have the naive belief that prescribed medications are not “hard drugs” and that they are less dangerous than the street drugs used by the stereotyped addict. After all, they’re taken by adults and given by doctors — FDA approved, mass-produced. Three out of 10 teenagers also think these drugs are not addictive, according to the Partnership Study.
Teens are readily learning how to optimize prescription-drug highs by crushing pills, doubling or tripling dosages, or simply taking handfuls of them. Whether knowingly or unwittingly, they’re also mixing them together with other seemingly benign, over-the-counter medicines, alcohol and street drugs. Many prescribed opiates like OxyContin are the pharmaceutical equivalent of heroin. And the brain doesn’t know the difference.
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October 29, 2009 at 3:57 am
This information is so important. It needs to be posted everywhere. I don’t think parents are as aware of this problem as they should be. They themselves maybe caught up in the prescription drugs as well. Yes these prescriptions are deadly, for children, teenagers and the parents.