Troubled Teens Resources

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.

The first few times a college student abuses prescription drugs might be to get thru exams. Then the addition of sports or a part time job cuts into study time and he finds he need more hours of the days to stay awake. The natural progression from there is to find drugs to go to sleep when the uppers won’t let you. From there, recreational use is the next easy step and, according to statistics, it ’s a step too many teenage college students take.

“…a recent study which found a dramatic increase in prescription drug abuse on college campuses from 1993 to 2005. The study, “Wasting the Best and the Brightest: Substance Abuse at America’s Colleges and Universities,” was released by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University.

Nearly half of full-time students binge drink and/or abuse prescription and illegal drugs, according to the report, and 1.8 million full-time students meet the medical criteria for dependency of a controlled substance.

Abuse of prescription opioids, or pain killers, increased 342.9 percent; abuse of prescription tranquilizers such as Xanax and Valium rose 450 percent; and abuse of prescription stimulants such as Adderall was up 93.3 percent from 1993 to 2005, according to the study.”
(Source)

Shopping for a Doctor

Students claim that it is easy to acquire scripts, just a matter of knowing the students who have a legitimate script or shopping for a doctor who will write one without bothering to question the list of fake symptoms presented.

If you think you have made it safely past the shoals of teen age drug abuse, there is an entirely new and dangerous arena that your teenager faces in college. With incredible pressure, easy availability and seemingly no other means of “keeping up”, a college student is beset by a whole different set of reasons to fall into drug dependency.