Marijuana has been around for decades, but something more deadly has entered the high school scene: prescription drugs. Painkillers like OxyContin, Vicodin, and Percocet are now the second-most used drugs among teens behind marijuana.
Since pain management is a relatively new field, many doctors have not had extensive pain control training. As a result, when a patient complains about physical discomfort, doctors do not “fully understand the range of treatment options besides opioids,” according to Business Insider.
Overdoses from heroin and other opioids are killing more than 27,000 people a year.
Doctors are overmedicating their patients. Approximately 70 percent of Americans take at least one prescription drug, according to researchers at the Mayo Clinic. The exponential rise in prescriptions is detailed in a recent report from the National Institute on Drug Abuse: In 1991, doctors wrote 76 million prescriptions for painkillers. By 2011, that number had nearly tripled to 219 million. Between 1999 and 2010, sales of Vicodin, Percocet, and OxyContin quadrupled.
While the United States has about 5 percent of the world’s population, it consumes nearly 99 percent of the world’s hydrocodone — the narcotic in Vicodin — and 80 percent of the world’s oxycodone, according to The New Yorker.
And these pills are very accessible. Nearly one in five high school students admits to abusing medications not prescribed to them, as reported by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most teenagers obtain pills from either friends or family members. Unsecured prescription painkillers in the parents’ and grandparents’ medical cabinets are the easiest targets for adolescents.
To get a reprieve from anxiety and stress, many students are turning to OxyContin. As one student said, “Ox makes me feel warm and relaxed.” However, once the high settles down, many teenagers experience nausea, headaches, insomnia, and muscle pain. They crave the former euphoric feelings, and this quickly leads to addiction.
Adolescents eventually build up a prescription drug tolerance and have to take more and more pills to get the same effect. In spite of this pill-popping, most adolescents do not think they are putting themselves in danger. They rationalize that the drugs are prescribed by doctors — so how dangerous can they be?
A recent study published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence showed that most heroin abusers started using prescription opioids before becoming addicted to heroin. As Dr. Bridget Kuehn, founder of SciBridge Media in Chicago, writes, “The incidence of heroin use is 19 times higher among individuals who have abused prescription pain medications than among those who have not.” As a result, prescription painkillers have become known as “gateway drugs.”
Related: Opiods + Pot = Danger
The National Institute on Drug Abuse believes that “many [teenagers] are still under the illusion that prescription drugs are somehow safer than street drugs, but it’s important to realize that prescription medications like hydrocodone and oxycodone are opioid derivatives — just like heroin.” Likewise, many parents overlook the potential dangers of painkillers.
As a Westchester, New York, dad said, “I’ve been worried about my son experimenting with alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine … I didn’t think about prescription drugs.”
Heroin is cheaper and more powerful than prescription painkillers. It reaches the brain within seconds and binds to opioid receptors, giving the user a surge of euphoria known as the “rush.” With repeated abuse, heroin changes the brain. Users develop “tolerance” — more and more heroin is needed to achieve the same high. Since opioid receptors are also involved in breathing, heroin can be deadly.
“I’ve been worried about my son experimenting with alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine. I didn’t think about prescription drugs,” said one parent.
Overdoses from heroin and other opioids are killing more than 27,000 people a year, according to “Frontline.” “Heroin is definitely more accessible than it has ever been,” said one New York police officer. It is prevalent in the suburbs, and in many cases, a bag of heroin is cheaper than a six-pack of beer.
“We are at a time when the unfathomable tragedies resulting from addiction, overdose, and death has become one of the most urgent, devastating public health crises facing our country,” said U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf.
As a result, the FDA has recommended tighter controls on painkiller prescriptions to control their flow into the market. Even so, the best treatment is prevention.
Teenagers whose parents talk with them regularly about the dangers of drugs are significantly less likely to use drugs than those whose parents do not.
Police departments are also taking action to mitigate the epidemic. Prescription Drug Take-Back Days are appearing in communities across the country, in which the police provide drop-off boxes to collect unused and unwanted drugs. However, it is extremely difficult to get to the root of this issue.
Related: Promising Fixes for Opioid Addiction
As one New York police officer says, “Identifying illegal prescription drug users can be tricky. Most times we get a call to provide medical attention and through the investigation, it is determined what was taken to cause the event.”
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