Carmody Middle School principal Heather Beck doesn’t know whether the number of kids taking prescription drugs pilfered from the family medicine chest is increasing.
But three of her students were charged with possessing the painkiller Dilaudid after a teacher spotted one passing a tablet to another recently.
“I have been an administrator for seven years, and this is the first time I have dealt with prescription drugs in school,” she said. “If it is increasing or just on my barometer, it is hard to say, but it is definitely on my barometer.”
In a 2005 Partnership for a Drug- Free America survey, 19 percent of U.S. teenagers reported having taken prescription painkillers or stimulants to get high.
Teen use of pharmaceuticals has risen dramatically over the past decade.
While illicit drug use among teenagers nationally continued to decline in 2007, the use of prescription drugs either held steady or slightly decreased from previous years, according to a study sponsored by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that either more kids are using over-the-counter medications and pharmaceuticals to get high in Colorado or school administrators are becoming more attuned to the problem.
“We are indeed seeing higher rates of disciplinary incidents related to prescription drugs than in past years,” said Whei Wong, Douglas County School District spokeswoman. I wouldn’t say it’s significant numbers, but it’s definitely on the upswing.”
The issue has raised concerns among parents and teachers.
On Tuesday night, about 60 people attended a Douglas County School District community discussion of the problem at Castle View High School.
Pot is still drug of choice
Marijuana continues to be the drug of choice among teens, said Jeff Egnor, Douglas County Sheriff’s Office supervisor for school resources.
“If education efforts don’t work, we are going to see prescription medicine right up there with marijuana.”
On Feb. 8, eight students at the high school were taken to a hospital after they took Oxycodone, a painkiller that one of them brought to the school.
Within weeks, a 13-year-old Castle Rock Middle School student gave an older girl three of his father’s Vicodin pills.
A member of Tuesday night’s panel, Alexis Mueller, a baby-faced 18-year-old who is recovering from cocaine addiction, said she frequently used prescription drugs when she couldn’t get coke, or just to boost her high.
“Drugs are all over, especially in Castle Rock, and your child is probably offered them more than you can imagine,” she said at the meeting.
While many teens think there are fewer risks in taking prescription medications than illegal drugs, the consequences can be just as disastrous.
“Kids assume that because it is pharmacy-grade, it is safe for them to take and they don’t consider other potential consequences that go along with it,” said Jim Steinhagen, executive director of youth services at the Hazelden Foundation, one of the world’s largest addiction-treatment centers.
The death of 28-year-old movie star Heath Ledger from an accidental overdose of anti-anxiety medication and prescription painkillers rammed home just how deadly these drugs can be.
Leading cause of OD deaths
According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, prescription-drug overdoses have surpassed cocaine and heroin overdoses as the leading cause of poisoning deaths.
Most of the legal drugs that teens abuse come from the medicine cabinets of parents, grandparents and friends. But some young people are adept at faking symptoms well enough to hoodwink a doctor into writing a prescription, Steinhagen said.
Internet sites offer drugs — ranging from Adderall, an amphetamine used to treat attention-deficit disorder, to Xanax — without a prescription.
Abusers of prescription drugs have also begun using the Internet to learn how to boost the effects of legal drugs.
The problem is big enough that the Office of National Drug Control Policy ran an ad during the Super Bowl to raise parents’ awareness about prescription-drug abuse.
“When we were growing up, it was cocaine, the hard stuff. We didn’t think about prescription medicine,” said Kevin Black, 42, who attended the panel discussion with his wife, Judy.
The couple’s 15-year-old daughter, Chelsea, is a freshman at the school.
Her mother said, “We wanted to learn more about this problem and what we need to notice, what type of prescriptions that we have at home that kids could be looking at.”
Tom McGhee: 303-954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com
