Saturday March 18, 9:46 AMAmerican kids getting high on prescription drugs
BOSTON (Reuters) When Paul Michaud's father died of cancer, the 16-year-old took OxyContin to ease his emotional pain.
He first snorted the prescription painkiller and within weeks he was injecting it into his veins for a more powerful high before turning to heroin as a cheaper option.
"It was the one drug that really pulled me. It took away everything," said Michaud, now 18, one of a new generation of American children getting high on and addicted to prescription drugs.
Teenagers are increasingly experimenting with legal drugs like OxyContin, widely known as "hillbilly heroin," and Vicodin, often bought online or taken from medicine cabinets, even before trying marijuana or alcohol, health officials say.
"Last year, painkillers were the No. 1 drug for people taking drugs for the first time," said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, an arm of the government's National Institutes of Health.
"It's been escalating and escalating," she said. "In the past, the No. 1 drug for new initiates was marijuana."
Michaud, who attended a Boston area high school, was caught stealing to pay for what he described as his almost instant addiction to OxyContin -- which can cost $80 to $100 for a 40 mg pill. He was then checked into a drug and alcohol clinic.
He has since been in and out of rehab programs six times.
"It destroyed my life pretty much. I haven't seen any of my teenage years," he said from the Phoenix House, a clinic in the western Massachusetts city of Springfield, where he says he has been clean for 50 days.
Michaud is not alone. Last year's Monitoring the Future study, produced jointly by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the University of Michigan, found a 38-percent rise in abuse of OxyContin among 18-year-olds between 2002 and 2005.
While overall drug use dropped 19 percent over the past four years, about one in 10 teenagers were abusing prescription drugs, the survey showed.
"PHARMING PARTIES"
Among the most dangerous experiments are "pharming parties" where children meet after scouring family medicine cabinets and dumping what they find into a bowl. They stir things up, dip in, randomly pluck drugs out and swallow them.
"They literally do not know what they are taking," said Michael Rich, director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Children's Hospital in Boston.
"They can overdose or take medications that counteract with each other or interact with each other in dangerous ways. When you combine the anti-anxiety drug Klonopin for example with alcohol, they work in the same way and can very much lower the threshold at which you stop breathing," he said.
Volkow at the National Institute on Drug Abuse said many teens associate prescription drugs with family doctors, and consider them safe, or have had positive experiences with properly prescribed medication in their early childhood.
The challenge, she said, is to control abuse without banning drugs that do more good than harm to society. OxyContin, which is sold generically and generates about $2 billion in annual sales, is widely used in hospitals.
The issue grabbed public attention in Boston after the suicide in January of 17-year-old Cameron O'Connor, who shot himself in the head a day after taking Klonopin. His death in Boston's middle-class Arlington suburb triggered calls for better ways to detect teen abuse of prescription drugs.
Teenagers are not the only prescription drug abusers. The number of people over the age of 55 treated for abuse of opiates, for example, has nearly doubled between 1995 and 2002, government statistics show. In 2003, conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh admitted becoming hooked on OxyContin.
"We're also seeing an increase in the use of these drugs in young adults," said Lloyd Johnston, lead investigator at Michigan's Institute for Social Research, which researches the government's 700-page Monitoring the Future study.
Copyright © 2006 Reuters Limited.
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