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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Teen age drug abuse is not a simple straight forward proposition. A myriad of factors can contribute to teens at risk saying yes to drugs. Very often divorce is the galvanizing factor in a teen’s descent into addiction.

“Hull said she was depressed “about anything and everything.” She was dealing with stress from her broken family and hadn’t gotten over the death of a childhood friend. She also bounced around, sometimes living with her dad, and then her mom, and then her boyfriend’s parents’ house.”

Combined with peer pressure, a culture that, more and more, tacitly accepts drug abuse and the unfortunate ease with which teens can secure prescription drugs, it is very easy for a disturbed teen to succumb to the constant temptation to do drugs.

“She also thinks she did drugs “just for the lifestyle I guess.”

“I wanted to be the life of the party,” she said. “I liked it when I could get drugs for people.”

In school, she would see other teens pass drugs to each other under the table or in between a piece of paper to make it look like a note. At one point, she said, she took some of her dad’s pain pills without him knowing, but it made her sick.”

Parents in the midst of divorce are often to caught up in their own drama to see how deeply affected their troubled teenagers might be. Never assume your teen is impervious to the lure of drugs.

He was surprised when his daughter got caught up in “bad choices.”

“I didn’t think she’d go that route because of her gifts and talents and what she could do…”

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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.

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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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There are more and more articles being written that cover the ongoing battle against the accelerating use of prescription drugs by troubled teenagers. Unfortunately, many of those articles center on the tragic instances of a teen’s death due to a prescription overdose. The article I excerpt below describes the campaign initiated by one set of bereaved parents.

“Cook of Denville spoke at an event designed to heighten awareness of the dangers of prescription drugs if taken improperly and to kick off a campaign to urge county residents to turn in to local authorities old or unused prescription drugs.”

One remark this bereaved fatheris worth noting.

“The father of a Morris Knolls High School student who died from an overdose of prescription drugs told a crowd outside the Morris County Courthouse on Wednesday that he and his wife felt they did all the right things to help their daughter.

The problem was, said Bob Cook, “we did them too late. We did all the right things, but after the fact.”

By the time they found drug counseling services, arranged for rehabilitation and paid full attention to their daughter’s drug problem, Cook said, Jessica Cook was already hooked.”

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“We did them too late.” This lesson so painfully learned by this father can serve as a warning to all parents. Educate yourself now about teen age substance abuse. Even if your teen does not appear to be at risk, start your research now so that you at least have a basic grasp of the available resources. Develop a list of troubled teen boarding schools and wilderness camps and teen behavioral programs. Acquaint yourself with available local resources and community drug abuse intervention efforts. Immunize your family against the scourge of addiction by being pro active, not reactive.

The specter of teen age drug abuse does not end at high school graduation but follows at-risk teens, like the promise of a curse, into college.

“It hits you a lot faster when you snort it, like 10 minutes, but it doesn’t last that long,” Kim said.

This is not a troubled teen talking but a college freshman who regularly uses Adderall to pull her through her all nighters spent studying. Her supply is obtained from a friend who has a legal prescription but doesn’t like how the drug feels and has no qualms distributing pills to her friends.

“Students who give their prescribed medicine to friends think they are helping them while making some money on the side, DeMaria said. He also said that some students who are prescribed stimulants like Adderall may feel peer pressure to sell to friends. The availability of these pills could be attributed to the over-diagnosis of ADHD, DeMaria said.”

Though research indicate that females are twice as likely to be addicted to stimulants like Adderall than men as well as the possibilities for strokes, depression and paranoia, most college students seem unfazed.

“College students have a tendency to perceive prescription drugs to be safer than other drugs because they are prescribed by a doctor, according to the CASA study.”

One answer to the problem seems unsatisfying only because it is so simple.

“Effective stress management can keep students from turning to stimulant abuse, DeMaria said, adding that students should be careful what they agree to without overloading their schedules. Toward the end of the semester when students tend to be busier, they should plan accordingly and make sure to take time to relax, DeMaria added.”

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Yes, simple enough but something that needs to start being taught when a student is a freshman in high school, not college. With the statistics inexorably becoming more and more grim regarding teen age drug abuse, it seems like stress and coping skills need to become a required course.

Another area requiring teen crisis intervention is found in your medicine cabinet. Teenagers have been going to extreme measures to get high. The newest fad, mentioned in an earlier post goes by the name “Trust”. An amazing moniker for what is basically a game of Russian Roulette.

We reported that teens are having parties, the centerpiece of which is a huge collection of pills that the kids randomly choose from in the hopes of getting a “buzz”. The collection is gathered from medicine cabinets at home and delivered to the party and thrown into the mix. Obviously it is a recipe for tragedy.

Here are some guidelines that a parent can use in dealing with prescription drug abuse.

1. Educate yourself and your teen about the risks. Prescription drugs can be just as dangerous and addictive as “street drugs,” and can be lethal. Talk to your teen about the dangers of these drugs.
2. Keep track of quantities. Take note of how many pills are in a bottle or pill packet and ask other households your teen visits to do the same, such as grandparents or other friends.
3. Talk to friends, relatives and school administration. Make sure your friends and relatives know about the risks, too, and encourage them to regularly monitor their own medicine cabinets.
4. Follow directions carefully. Make sure you and your teen use Rx drugs only as prescribed by a medical doctor and take only the recommended dosages as indicated for both Rx and OTC drugs.
5. 5. Discard old or unused medications.
6. Monitor your teen’s time online. Check browser histories and set a time limit for how long your teen can be online. For more information on how to monitor your child’s online activities, visit theAntiDrug.com’s online tutorial.
7. Be observant. If you find your teen is quickly going through cough syrup, or you find empty bottles and pill packages among your child’s personal effects, talk with her, listen carefully, and determine if there is a problem. If there is a problem, call your family physician immediately.
8. Find other ways to relieve stress and have fun. Many teens point to personal and family stress, as well as boredom, as reasons they abuse Rx and OTC drugs. Help your teen find other ways to relieve pressures, for example through positive activities that interest your child, positive friendships, or by simply listening and offering guidance. Also, help your teen find constructive ways to pass time and set a good example yourself.

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