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.”
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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.

Teen age drug abuse can often start innocently enough. A sports injury or any type of surgery can, unfortunately, provide the teen with their first taste for narcotics through no choice of their own. But if a severe injury necessitates a long period of opiates, it can leave it’s recipient an inadvertent addict.

“At 15, Jared Hess began using prescribed painkillers in his battle with chronic kidney stone problems, and by 18 he was addicted to Oxycontin, an opiate-based painkiller he was given for his illness.

The Owings Mills resident, now in his fourth year of recovery and working as an advocate for Faces and Voices of Recovery, spoke at a news conference earlier this month in Washington D.C. to announce the start of National Alcohol Drug and Alcohol Recovery Month.
[…]
Overall, an estimated 7 million Americans abused prescription drugs in 2006, the report revealed. That’s up 9.3 percent from an estimated 6.4 million in 2005.
[…]
Hess… was given Oxycontin during a month-long hospital stay and continued to use the painkillers against doctor’s orders after he was discharged. He went into recovery January 2003, seeking help at an in-patient facility. He said the recovery process never really stops.

“I think about recovery every day, primarily because it’s my job, but it’s always with you,” he said.”

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Unfortunately many of these addicts are met with the same disapproval extended to those who have no medical excuse for their adventure into drugs. If you have a teen who requires a heavy pain med, consult with your physician on how to best avoid this type of tragedy.

Read more on prescription abuse at Teen Options.

Teen age drug abuse is a major concern for parents and the latest report shows that they should be. Parents may be the “supplier” for their teen and not even know it.

“Sept. 6, 2007 — Illegal drug use among U.S. teens didn’t drop for the first time since 2002, according to a government report released Thursday.

The report also showed a continuing rise in the use of prescription drugs for recreational purposes, a trend that is alarming drug officials.

The report, released annually by the Bush administration, showed 9.8% of American kids between 12 and 17 years of age used an illegal drug within a month of being surveyed in 2006. The figure is unchanged from the same report the year before, even though illegal drug use overall is down about 15% since 2002, according to the report.

Prescription Abuse
Officials blamed the stagnation on rising abuse rates of painkillers and other prescription drugs. Nearly 50 million Americans older than 12 years of age acknowledged using prescription drugs for a nonmedical use, a large jump from three years earlier.

Most abuse of prescription drugs involves narcotic painkillers like Vicodin and OxyContin. In May, OxyContin manufacturer Purdue Pharma was fined $600 million after pleading guilty to concealing the addictive risks of the drug.

But Bush administration officials said Thursday that most of the abused supply of the drugs comes from leftover pills in unused prescriptions.

Terry Cline, PhD, chief of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration, said the agency is launching a campaign in pharmacies warning patients to discard their unused pills.”

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KD

The fight against teen age drug abuse, specifically against prescription drug abuse, is a bit harder for parents and law enforcement in the state of Florida. Both abusers and dealers have been flooding into the state because it’s one of several states in the country that does not keep a central data base of prescriptions filled.

Recent reports have indicated that illegally obtained prescription pills now out paces illegal drug abuse as the reigning threat our teens at risk face nationwide.

“Drug abusers and drug dealers have discovered a soft spot in the nation’s prescription drug system — the Sunshine State — and they’re exploiting this weakness with increasing regularity.

The number of prescriptions written in Florida for morphine, codeine, meperidine, oxycodone and hydrocodone rose 142 percent between 1997 and 2005…Between 2000 and 2006, an average of 341 people died in the state each year by overdosing on Oxycontin and Percocet.

There’s a reason Florida has become so popular with the prescription drug crowd — and it’s not the sunshine.

The state lacks a central database that would enable authorities to monitor excessive — and suspicious — purchases of prescription drugs, and investigate abuses.
[…]
Drug addicts and dealers often will choose the path of least resistance. When one state cracks now on some aspect of the drug trade, the purveyors of illegal products inevitably seek out new territories.”

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Teens at risk for drug addiction have been increasingly turning to prescription drugs. Campaigns directed at educating parents are showing up as integral to teen crisis intervention awareness programs, not only in America, but through out the world.

Sadly, too often these campaigns and community efforts are birthed in the broken hearts of bereaved parents.

When Jordan Hall didn’t feel high enough, he found a way to get another pill. Xanax. Valium. Or OxyContin. He craved them all.

In the past few months, Jordan prowled emergency rooms in Allen, Plano and then McKinney, begging for prescriptions. He stole money out of his doting mother’s bank account. And then on July 3, he met a dealer down the street from his house and paid $80 for OxyContin pills, a strong narcotic pain reliever.

The next day, his mother, Susie, shook her son to wake him up so they could watch July Fourth fireworks together. His body lay stiff on the living room sofa, his head propped up like he was watching television.

At age 20, he was dead.

(Source)

What follows is a sad and all too common story. A single mother working long hours while raising her son, lavishing him with love and material gifts. We have all known or been this woman. And she wasn’t negligent. She didn’t ignore the first whiff of marijuana. She noted the Xanax missing from her prescription. She began the long battle for her son’s life from the moment she realized the road he was taking.

Sometimes the odds are stacked against you. What is alarming is how teens like Jordan can so easily acquire prescriptions from duped doctors. Read the entire sobering account at the link above.

Teens at risk are making some very unsound judgments about prescription drugs. Some students who swear they wouldn’t touch a street drug, have no problem with mixing up a few pills. Fatal combinations are not infrequent.

The article linked below describes one young man’s near brush with death when he mixed Prozac with fentanyl patches obtained from a friend. Not a drug user, he was attempting to allay the anxiety that his Prozac prescription had failed to soothe. Teen age drug abuse often begins with such mis-steps and though his near death is horrifying, it probably saved him from going furthur down that road.

Teens have extremely easy access to these drugs and they are far easier to conceal than marijuana or cocaine. It is disheartening to read the next excerpt, but it should serve as strong evidence that a parent must be very familiar with their teens’ school, their friends and how they spend their time. If they do not go to a dealer, a dealer will come to them.

“A former high-school drug dealer who used to sell oxycontin, Vicodin, methadone, Xanax and other prescriptions says fellow students approached him about 30 times a day for pills. His customers ranged from preppies to grungers to athletes, he said, and “I always made at least a couple hundred dollars a day.”

“People have to have it (medications) to feel good,” he said. “You feel like you’re going to die, you go through such bad withdrawals. … you’d be sick all day until you find a way to get money or get drugs.”

He dealt for several years to support his own habit before he was caught selling drugs in a school zone and became an undercover drug informant for police.”
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Troubled teenagers, unfortunately, are becoming just one of several categories of youth that are increasingly vulnerable to eventual teenage drug abuse. Where drug education was once directed primarily at junior and seniors in high school, it is now also encompassing kids from elementary school up.

One such program developed and offered by National Families in Action is Club HERO.

Club HERO, developed and tested under a 5-year grant from the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention, provides a positive, nurturing atmosphere for middle-school children during the critical after-school hours.

Home Club HERO (Helping Everyone Reach Out) rewards students for
“doing their job” well with visible motivation. Students earn points for a variety of achievements and behaviors related to
school performance and participation in tasks at home. They then redeem the points for Club HERO incentives and gifts.

“The point collection system is fun and provides the incentive children need to make an extra effort,” says sixth-grade teacher Caitlin Sims.”

The program includes materials that demonstrate how the brain works with and without chemical influences, providing a sound basis for the warnings to avoid all temptations to get high, much like decades ago when pictures of smoke damaged lungs drove the anti-smoking movement into full gear. Seeing Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears perform as glamorous addicts do little to dissuade teens away from drug abuse but a vivid demonstration of how Oxycontin and alcohol are destroying their brains might.

The constant stream of pharmaceutical commercials aimed at adults do little to help a parent teach a troubled teen that medication isn’t the first or best answer for solving problems. In a culture and society that emphasizes instant gratification, teaching an at-risk teenager that restraint and discipline are virtues becomes an increasingly uphill battle. A specific problem with prescription pills is the veneer of safety that they offer. A drug abusing teenager is likely to think he is safer taking a pharmaceutical than he is with a street drug.

Just as a parent has to accept the reality of malicious strangers and predatory sex offenders as given threats in their at-risk teen’s everyday life, parents need to be aware of a constant underlying theme in film, in advertising and in music is to “get high” or “feel better”. A combination of peer pressure and society’s unfortunate obsession with the quick fix can cause a teen to conclude that self-medicating is a normal and acceptable way of dealing with upset and pain.

“According to the most comprehensive study on U.S. teenage drug abuse, the intentional abuse of legal medicines continues to be a “pernicious problem”.

“Overall prescription drug abuse has become a more important part of the nation’s drug problem,” said Dr. Lloyd Johnston, who runs the ongoing University of Michigan study.

Last December, the survey found that 9 percent of 16- to 18-year-olds intentionally abused prescription narcotics such as Vicodin in 2006.

“The use of Oxycontin has doubled among 8th graders (12- to 14-year-olds) since 2002,” Johnston said.

Other common household drugs popularly misused included dextromethorphan, found in cough syrups.

The Partnership for a Drug-Free America, a not-for-profit lobby group sponsoring the briefings, said parents are part of the problem.

“The problem in general is the parents’ attitudes (were) as bad as the kids on this subject,” said Steve Pasierb, chief executive of the Partnership.

“The parents think they know all about drugs so they say, ‘At least it’s not heroin’,” he added.

“Kids like it because it’s hot and it’s new, they believe it’s safe and there’s relative ease of access.”

And taking tablets from home medicine cabinets is cheaper than buying drugs from street drug dealers.
[…]
“Kids see prescription drugs differently,” said Dr. Herbert Kleber, a former U.S. drug policy adviser to the White House. “They’re more pure and have a guaranteed potency.”

Kleber said most of the kids get information online on what drugs to take. “There are numerous Web sites they can go to learn the pros and cons,” he said.”
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