Text 20680, 87 rader
Skriven 2006-06-13 16:24:50 av Alan Hess
Ärende: prescription problems
=============================
Another example of the impossibility of winning the War on Drugs.  If there's a
demand for something, it will be filled.  Even prescription drugs, which are
the most regulated, and supposedly difficult to get, are not (heck, some guy
asked me if I wanted some Percoset the other day while I was in front of a
store at a suburban shopping center.)  Education, and treatment of addicts, may
be the most cost effective answer.

This is part of the article.  The entirety can be read at the url below my
snip.

*****


 
USA TODAY      
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Prescription drugs find place in teen culture
Updated 6/12/2006 11:48 PM ET
By Donna Leinwand, USA TODAY
When a teenager in Jan Sigerson's office mentioned a "pharm party" in February,
Sigerson thought the youth was talking about a keg party out on a farm.

"Pharm," it turned out, was short for pharmaceuticals, such as the powerful
painkillers Vicodin and OxyContin. Sigerson, program director for Journeys, a
teen drug treatment program in Omaha, soon learned that area youths were
organizing parties to down fistfuls of prescription drugs. Since February,
several more youths at Journeys have mentioned that they attended pharm
parties, Sigerson says.

"When you start to see a pattern, you know it's becoming pretty widespread,"
she says. "I expect it to get worse before it gets better."

Drug counselors across the USA are beginning to hear about similar pill-popping
parties, which are part of a rapidly developing underground culture that
surrounds the rising abuse of prescription drugs by teens and young adults.

It's a culture with its own lingo: Bowls and baggies of random pills often are
called "trail mix," and on Internet chat sites, collecting pills from the
family medicine chest is called "pharming."

Carol Falkowski, director of research communications for the Hazelden
Foundation, says young abusers of prescription drugs also have begun using the
Internet to share "recipes" for getting high. Some websites are so simplistic,
she says, that they refer to pills by color, rather than their brand names,
content or potency.

That, Falkowski says, could help explain why emergency rooms are reporting that
teens and young adults increasingly are showing up overdosed on bizarre and
potentially lethal combinations of pills.

Overdoses of prescription and over-the-counter drugs accounted for about
one-quarter of the 1.3 million drug-related emergency room admissions in 2004,
the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration reported
last month.

The abuse of prescription and over-the-counter drugs - which barely registered
a blip in drug-use surveys a decade ago - is escalating at what Falkowski and
other analysts say is an alarming rate.

In a 2005 survey by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, 19% of U.S.
teenagers - roughly 4.5 million youths - reported having taken prescription
painkillers such as Vicodin or OxyContin or stimulants such as Ritalin or
Adderall to get high.

Vicodin has been particularly popular in recent years; a study by the
University of Michigan in 2005 found that nearly 10% of 12th-graders had used
it in the previous year. About 5.5% said they had used OxyContin. Both drugs
are now more popular among high school seniors than Ecstasy and cocaine.

Marijuana is still the most popular drug by far; about one-third of the
12th-graders surveyed said they had used it in the previous year.

<snip> 
 
Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2006-06-12-teens-pharm-drugs_x.htm
 
 
 

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