Troubled Teens Resources

Teen crisis intervention education in the area of prescription drugs emphasizes one point constantly; just because you got the drug from a doctor, doesn’t mean that taking that drug will always be a safe experience. Just because it is prescribed, doesn’t make it less addictive.

“No matter what he put in his body or how he acquired it, Alexander McCain would never have seen himself as an addict.

After all, he wasn’t snorting cocaine or injecting heroin. He was taking things anyone can get from the doctor.

“It’s so much easier to party by popping an OxyContin in your mouth instead of shooting up with heroin,” said Alexander’s brother, Steven Dick. “It makes it seem like you’re not doing drugs. Alexander would never consider himself a druggy, even though he was doing drugs all the time.”
(source)

And his autopsy would prove it. He died from a combination of alcohol and his favorite “safe” prescription. But teens are not the only ones who misunderstand addiction.

One teen complained to me that she couldn’t abide her mother’s hypocrisy. Her mother is on anti-depressants, valuium and sleeping pills. Because all of this was prescribed, she differentiated her drug use from that of her daughter’s drug using friends. She’d be wrong and her daughter would be right to call her on it.

But her daughter will run into the biggest obstacle to recovery that addicts have - denial. Denial is extremely powerful. It has to be powerful for Alexander to have become addicted to the same drugs that killed his brother two years earlier.