"Pills are the New Pot on Campus"

[BlackShanglan]

Or so claims a CNN article spun off of Gore's son's arrest. But here's the part that baffles me: the choice of pills. They included Adderall and Vicodin, both of which I have taken with some frequency under prescription.

I realize that I do, of course, have the constitution of a horse, but I honestly cannot see the slightest recreational potential in either. I hardly notice them other than for the absence of the negative issues they are meant to suppress; that, and Vicodin makes me sleepy. Should I assume that people are simply taking massively, massively more than a prescription dose, or that they are crushing or snorting or injecting them in some inventive way, or simply that taking drugs for fun is really a great deal duller than I had always assumed?

 

[jomar]

If you don't have ADHD or ADD Adderall acts as a stimulant, which it is. It has a "paradoxical" effect on those with ADHD/ADD. And some love those pain meds that make them loopy. But it's also at the high school level. Sad but true.

 

[Guest]

Or so claims a CNN article spun off of Gore's son's arrest. But here's the part that baffles me: the choice of pills. They included Adderall and Vicodin, both of which I have taken with some frequency under prescription.

I realize that I do, of course, have the constitution of a horse, but I honestly cannot see the slightest recreational potential in either. I hardly notice them other than for the absence of the negative issues they are meant to suppress; that, and Vicodin makes me sleepy. Should I assume that people are simply taking massively, massively more than a prescription dose, or that they are crushing or snorting or injecting them in some inventive way, or simply that taking drugs for fun is really a great deal duller than I had always assumed?

But Adderall's an amphetamine (a combination of 5, I think?) so I suppose that's the interest there.

Not sure about Vicodin.

 

[Guest]

...........

 

[hmmnmm]

No wonder we've lost so much respect - turned into one big virgin pussy.
See, back in my day, we smoked fat joints... the harsh ones. Hack hack!

 

[3113]

I realize that I do, of course, have the constitution of a horse, but I honestly cannot see the slightest recreational potential in either. I hardly notice them other than for the absence of the negative issues they are meant to suppress; that, and Vicodin makes me sleepy.

I was on Vicodin for migraine pain some years back. It made me sleepy, but also a little hallucinatory--kind of dreamy and trippy. I could see how that might be pleasant for some folk. Also, I don't know about your meds, but my Vicodin always had a warning label reminding the person taking them that they could be addictive. I suspect that, like alcohol or pot, some folks are more easily hooked than others and once hooked, find it hard to stop.

Luckily, or not so luckily for me, I started to associate--in true, Clockwork Orange, classical-conditioning fashion--the Vicodin with the migraines. It got to a point where I couldn't swallow the damn things. As my migranes sometimes included throwing up, I even started feeling sick when I put them in my mouth. Which is how I avoided getting hooked on Vicodin

 

[3113]

See, back in my day, we smoked fat joints... the harsh ones. Hack hack!

Yeah. What's this country coming to when kids aren't willing to make a bong out of a Sparklett's water bottle? The young today don't know what it means to get high.

 

[hmmnmm]

Yeah. What's this country coming to when kids aren't willing to make a bong out of a Sparklett's water bottle? The young today don't know what it means to get high.

The work ethic got lost somewhere.

 

[R. Richard]

Although not strictly on subject, I lived [or whatever] in the Whites Sands, NM area for a brief time and had very bad allergy problems. I was told by a doctor to take Chlor-Trimeton (the antihistamine chlorpheniramine). There are all kinds of warnings to not drive or operate machinery, etc. while using Chlor-Trimeton. I never had any symptoms, except the ability to breath again. I mentioned the matter to several people at work and one of them told me that she would use Chlor-Trimeton only if she absolutely had to to counteract a bad case of hay fever. The reason for the avoidance was that the stuff knocked her out for a day or so.

Apparently different people have very different reactions to drugs.

 

[BlackShanglan]

Odd how differently drugs can affect people. I've never felt anything trippy from the Vicodin (although I did know that it could be very addictive). On the other hand, I'm a complete lightweight for Benadryl - one dose and I am physically unable to stay awake. It gives me bizarre and unpleasant dreams too. Even in my sleep I feel disoriented and off balance.

 

[LadynStFreknBed]

They are called "pill parties" or "pharm parties." Teenagers bring whatever pills they can find, from home, grandparents houses or wherever. They throw all the pills in a big bowl and help themselves. It's scary how dangerous this is. I caught my 14 yo daughter with a stash of prescription pills she had stolen from me & my parents.

 

[BlackShanglan]

It's enough to make one seek out a medication with no effect other than intense nausea, and stock some of that in.

 

[3113]

They are called "pill parties" or "pharm parties." Teenagers bring whatever pills they can find, from home, grandparents houses or wherever. They throw all the pills in a big bowl and help themselves. It's scary how dangerous this is. I caught my 14 yo daughter with a stash of prescription pills she had stolen from me & my parents.

Whoa. That is scary. I'm very sorry your daughter got involved in that. It's especially scary when I think of the pills that parents and grandparents might take--blood pressure, thyroid, heart meds, sleep aids...not a few with warnings about possible side effects and warnings about mixing meds.

Then again, I look at something like this and I think: "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose"--the more things change....

From illegal alcohol to LSD to Glue sniffing and Ecstasy, teens will find a way be stupid. Lucky for all of us, they usually grow out of it and bemoan just how stupid they were when they reach adulthood.

 

[tickledkitty]

Yeah. What's this country coming to when kids aren't willing to make a bong out of a Sparklett's water bottle? The young today don't know what it means to get high.

Or a pipe out of a Coke can.

 

[3113]

Yikes! This is horrific! Long article but worth reading:

Prescription drugs find place in teen culture

When a teenager in Jan Sigerson's office mentioned a "pharm party" in February, Sigerson thought the youth was talking about a keg party out on a farm. "Pharm," it turned out, was short for pharmaceuticals, such as the powerful painkillers Vicodin and OxyContin. Sigerson, program director for Journeys, a teen drug treatment program in Omaha, soon learned that area youths were organizing parties to down fistfuls of prescription drugs. Since February, several more youths at Journeys have mentioned that they attended pharm parties, Sigerson says.

"When you start to see a pattern, you know it's becoming pretty widespread," she says. "I expect it to get worse before it gets better."

Drug counselors across the USA are beginning to hear about similar pill-popping parties, which are part of a rapidly developing underground culture that surrounds the rising abuse of prescription drugs by teens and young adults. It's a culture with its own lingo: Bowls and baggies of random pills often are called "trail mix," and on Internet chat sites, collecting pills from the family medicine chest is called "pharming."

Carol Falkowski, director of research communications for the Hazelden Foundation, says young abusers of prescription drugs also have begun using the Internet to share "recipes" for getting high. Some websites are so simplistic, she says, that they refer to pills by color, rather than their brand names, content or potency. That, Falkowski says, could help explain why emergency rooms are reporting that teens and young adults increasingly are showing up overdosed on bizarre and potentially lethal combinations of pills.

Overdoses of prescription and over-the-counter drugs accounted for about one-quarter of the 1.3 million drug-related emergency room admissions in 2004, the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration reported last month. The abuse of prescription and over-the-counter drugs — which barely registered a blip in drug-use surveys a decade ago — is escalating at what Falkowski and other analysts say is an alarming rate.

In a 2005 survey by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, 19% of U.S. teenagers — roughly 4.5 million youths — reported having taken prescription painkillers such as Vicodin or OxyContin or stimulants such as Ritalin or Adderall to get high. Vicodin has been particularly popular in recent years; a study by the University of Michigan in 2005 found that nearly 10% of 12th-graders had used it in the previous year. About 5.5% said they had used OxyContin. Both drugs are now more popular among high school seniors than Ecstasy and cocaine.

Marijuana is still the most popular drug by far; about one-third of the 12th-graders surveyed said they had used it in the previous year.

Falkowski, whose foundation is a treatment center based in Center City, Minn., says prescription pills have become popular among youths because they are easy to get and represent a more socially acceptable way of getting high than taking street drugs. Some kids, she says, are self-medicating undiagnosed depression or anxiety, while others are using stimulants to try to get an edge on tests and studying.

Falkowski says prescription drugs are familiar mood-altering substances for a generation that grew up as prescriptions soared for Ritalin and other stimulants to treat maladies such as attention-deficit disorder. "Five million kids take prescription drugs every day for behavior disorders," she says. "It's not unusual for kids to share pills with their friends. There have been incidents where kids bring a Ziploc baggie full of pills to school and share them with other kids."

Pharm parties, she says, are "simply everyone pooling whatever pills they have together and having a good time on a Saturday night. Kids ... don't think about the consequences."

Lisa Cappiello, 39, of Brooklyn, N.Y., says that seemed to be the case with her son, Eddie. She says she knew that he had tried marijuana at 15 and sneaked beers at school. But it wasn't until after he graduated from high school and took a year off before college that Cappiello realized the extent of her son's drug use — and the hold prescription drugs had on him. "In what seemed like the blink of an eye, it went from marijuana and an occasional beer to so much Xanax that (one day) my husband had to pick him up when he feel asleep on a street corner waiting for some friends," she said. "He hid his drug use from me so well."

The next day, Eddie Cappiello admitted to his parents that he had taken 15 pills of Xanax, a brand name for benzodiazepine that acts as a sedative. He told his parents Xanax helped him deal with anxiety and depression. Eddie rejected professional help and vowed to stop taking pills, his mother says. He was clean for 10 months, she says, before he was hospitalized in July 2005 after overdosing. Two months later, he entered a 28-day treatment program, his mother says. After he was discharged, he stayed clean for about two months — then relapsed into weekend binging: 40 to 50 pills and a quart of Jack Daniel's, sometimes by himself, sometimes with friends, Lisa Cappiello says.

Eddie Cappiello, 22, died in his bed on Feb. 17 after overdosing on a mix of pharmaceuticals. He left behind a girlfriend and two young children. A toxicology report said he had 134 milligrams of Xanax — the equivalent of 67 pills — and an opioid derivative in his system, his mother says.

"Before four years ago, I never even heard the word Xanax," Lisa Cappiello says. "Now ... I know kids as young as 12 are using it. Then I found out that Vicodin was a very big party drug. Before school, after school, at parties. Kids mixed them with alcohol and Ecstasy. It was baffling to me."

Cappiello says police, teachers and parents are so fixated on street drugs such as marijuana, cocaine and Ecstasy that they are missing the start of an epidemic. "Eddie was not the first kid to die in this neighborhood from prescription drugs," she says.

In recent months, federal anti-drug officials have acknowledged that they didn't anticipate the quick escalation of prescription-drug abuse. Most government-sponsored drug prevention programs focus on marijuana, tobacco, alcohol and methamphetamine. "We were taken by surprise when we started to see a high instance of abuse of prescription drugs," says Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA), which is collecting information about how teens perceive, get and use prescription drugs so it can try to craft an effective prevention campaign.

In a bulletin last year, NIDA called the increase in pharmaceutical drug abuse among teens "disturbing" and said pharm parties were a "troubling trend." The increasing availability of prescription drugs is a big reason for the rise in their abuse, Volkow and other drug specialists say. Pharmaceutical companies' production of two often-abused prescription drugs — hydrocodone and oxycodone, the active ingredients in drugs such as Vicodin and OxyContin — has risen dramatically as the drugs' popularity for legitimate uses has increased. Drug companies made 29 million doses of oxycodone in 2004, up from 15 million four years earlier. Hydrocodone doses rose from 14 million in 2000 to 24 million in 2004.

The 2005 Partnership survey found that more than three in five teens can easily get prescription painkillers from their parents' medicine cabinets. And as Falkowski says, the rising number of youths being treated with stimulants has made it easier for kids to use such drugs illicitly. About 3% of children are treated with a stimulant such as Adderall or Ritalin, up from less than 1% in 1987.

Almost all of the 13 youths at Phoenix House's intensive outpatient treatment program on New York City's Upper West Side have dabbled in prescription drugs, director Tessa Vining says. "There's definitely easy access," she says. "Maybe a parent had some surgery and took one or two painkillers from a bottle of 10, and the rest are just hanging out in the medicine cabinet."

After her son died, Cappiello says she wondered how kids in her area were getting pills. She says she learned from police that one local dealer got Xanax from his mother, who had been given a prescription for the drug. Instead of taking the pills, she gave them to her son to sell for $2 to $3 each.

Paul Michaud, 18, of Boston, says he got his first taste of OxyContin pills — he calls them OCs — from a friend during his freshman year in high school. Until then, Michaud says, he had smoked marijuana daily and taken a Percocet pill occasionally. Michaud's father had recently died of cancer, and Michaud says he was depressed and feeling like an outsider at school. The prescription painkiller made him feel like nothing could faze him, he recalls.

"The first time I did it, I was hooked," says Michaud, who is four months into a yearlong drug treatment program at Phoenix House in Springfield, Mass. He says he quickly became a daily OxyContin user, breaking apart the time-release capsules, crushing pills and snorting the powder from five 80-milligram pills a day. "They're not very hard to get. I could find OCs easier than I could find pot," Michaud says. "There were plenty of people who sold them," including some dealers who got pills illicitly by mail order.

To try to reduce the supply of prescription drugs on the black market, authorities have shut down several "pill mills" — where doctors prescribe inordinate amounts of narcotics — as well as Internet pharmacies that ship drugs with little medical consultation, says Catherine Harnett, chief of demand reduction for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Last September, DEA agents arrested 18 people allegedly responsible for 4,600 such pharmacies.

A tricky part of the prescription-drug problem, Harnett says, is addressing the perception among youths that pills are safe because they are "medicine." Many teens don't equate taking such pills with using drugs such as heroin or cocaine, she says. "If you start with pills, it seems fairly sanitary and legitimate," she says. "Kids have been lulled into believing that good medicine can be used recreationally."

Two in five teens in the Partnership study said prescription medicines, even if they are not prescribed by a doctor, are "much safer" to use than illegal drugs.

Phil Bauer of York, Pa., believes his son, Mark, 18, an avid weight lifter, started using prescription drugs to relieve chronic back pain and didn't appreciate the potential risks of taking the drugs. Bauer says his son never behaved as he imagined a drug addict would. "He wasn't hanging out all night. He had parents who wouldn't let him do that."

Mark Bauer died of an overdose on May 28, 2004. The toxicology report found morphine, oxycodone and acetaminophen — the active ingredient in Tylenol but also an ingredient in Vicodin — in his system, Phil Bauer says. Before his son's death, "we didn't see a bleary-eyed guy. He wasn't slurring his words," the father says. "He seemed to have a lot to live for. I did not know prescription-drug abuse was a problem. There's so much guilt in that. I don't know if I stuck my head in the ground. I did not see this coming."

 

[shereads]

Vicodan can be tons o' fun. Or so I'm told.

Interesting thing about the War on Drugs: we're shown statistics that allegedly prove it's working; our untold billions have reduced the number of young people who use {name of last year's drug of choice goes here.) What we're rarely told is that for every drug that loses popularity, another drug becomes trendy.

The problem with drugs is that they work, pretty much as advertised. They make people who feel bad or bored or shy or unloved feel some other way, for a while. The threat of side effects, addiction, deadly overdose or a criminal record doesn't mean much to the young. They are bullet-proof. And the fact that our laws treat marijuana like a dangerous killer (and its alcoholic equivalent like a soft drink for grownups) adds to the problem, by diluting the credibility of all anti-drug messages.

Hypocrisy among their elders is a favorite target of the rebellious young. The Drug War provides it in spades.

The War on Drugs, like the War on Terror as Bush is waging it, is a cruelly efficient system for funneling public money into private coffers. Neither of these so-called wars can be be allowed to end; they are of too much benefit, politically and monetarily, to a few shrewd players on both sides of the law. The bureaucracies that serve them are too fat and too entrenched to budge.

Both sides in the Drug War are enabled by our weaknesses: the drug user's pain or boredom or naivete; the voter's fear of a world out of control.

It's a symbiotic relationship that works as well - and can be just as deadly - as the most addictive narcotic.

 

[BlackShanglan]

You know, I really do hear and feel the appeal of the total legalization perspective from time to time. It's attractive in so many ways, and inexpensive as well (at least on the enforcement end), and promises so much ...

And then I go and watch a few episodes of "Cops," and ask whether anyone in them would be better off with cheaper and more regular access to drugs. Ugh.

 

[shereads]

Or a pipe out of a Coke can.

Or rolliing papers out of a Tampax wrapper.

Those were the days.

(NOT the plasticized paper. That stuff's full of chemicals!)

 

[shereads]

You know, I really do hear and feel the appeal of the total legalization perspective from time to time. It's attractive in so many ways, and inexpensive as well (at least on the enforcement end), and promises so much ...

And then I go and watch a few episodes of "Cops," and ask whether anyone in them would be better off with cheaper and more regular access to drugs. Ugh.

We'd all be better off without the criminal underworld that serves the blackmarket for drugs.

Our prisons would be relatively empty. Our courts would have time on their hands.

Maybe junkies could afford clean needles.

Terrorists and warlords would be denied a lucrative source of income.

Most importantly, we would once again live in a country where what adults put into their own bodies, for better or worse, would be no one's business but their own; the law would intrude on our alleged freedom only if we endangered others by using our vices irresponsibly.

We'd be a step closer to clearing up what we really mean when we insist "It's a free country."

Shanglan, don't you suppose that people who opposed the repeal of Prohibition had the same fear? That legalizing alcohol would make it easy for drunks to buy cheap booze and lie around in the gutter, wasting their lives? Sure they did. And they were right.

The question is, would you go back to Prohibition, and the denial of your freedom to make your own, informed choices, because there are people who won't choose wisely?

 

[3113]

They are bullet-proof. And the fact that our laws treat marijuana like a dangerous killer (and its alcoholic equivalent like a soft drink for grownups) adds to the problem, by diluting the credibility of all anti-drug messages.

Well, in this current case the problem is even worse. As mentioned in the article above, the users are under the misconception (or denial/excuse) that the drugs are "medicine" and so can't be bad. And as many doctors prescribe drugs to solve teen problems like depression or ADD, kids grow up thinking that pills are the solution and that they're no big deal. T.V. Commercials advocate pills for solving just about any problem from weight to insomnia, with side effects listed only at the end and very quickly.

This isn't to say that I think we should erase medication for teens with severe mental/emotional problems. If it helps them then it helps them. But if we're going to use medicine to solve mental as well as physical problems then we have to start educating kids and adults on the short-comings, dangers and side-effects of such medicines. We can't keep presenting them as fool-proof and perfectly safe cure-alls that can be mixed and matched with no repercussions.

 

[hmmnmm]

Wow! All this about the pills makes crack look like a wholesome bottle of Coca Cola.

 

[3113]

And then I go and watch a few episodes of "Cops," and ask whether anyone in them would be better off with cheaper and more regular access to drugs. Ugh.

I have to agree with Shereads. Legality or illegality, including putting people in jail for such things, isn't going to stop stupid people from being really stupid--or self-destructive. In answer to your question, though: one of the major reasons for repealing prohibition was that illegal alcohol could not be monitored. People were making up bathtub gin with all kinds of poisons, and as because it was illegal, they didn't much care who they sold it to--young kids included.

By making the liquor legal, the government could require that it pass certain safety laws--that it have good ingredients, limit the "proof" of the alcohol, they could create rules on how and to whom it was sold. Hence, if we make drugs legal, you get the same requirements. The drugs must be of a certain quality, must list info, and there can be limits on how and to whom it can be sold. As selling it legally makes the money, people are less likely to break the law and lose the money. A bar or liquor store doesn't want to be closed down, after all.

So, yes, these people *would* be better off it they could have cheaper access to regular drugs, as those drugs would be less deadly and time/place of sales would be regulated. The drugs could also be taxed and that tax money invested in programs to help addicts get off drugs.

 

[BlackShanglan]

Shanglan, don't you suppose that people who opposed the repeal of Prohibition had the same fear? That legalizing alcohol would make it easy for drunks to buy cheap booze and lie around in the gutter, wasting their lives? Sure they did. And they were right.

The question is, would you go back to Prohibition, and the denial of your freedom to make your own, informed choices, because there are people who won't choose wisely?

Oh, believe me. It always appeals to me when put this way. But then I think, "Given the massive problems we already have with alcohol, why on earth would we want a dozen more of the same thing?"

'Tis a puzzlement, and no doubt.

 

[BlackShanglan]

So, yes, these people *would* be better off it they could have cheaper access to regular drugs, as those drugs would be less deadly and time/place of sales would be regulated. The drugs could also be taxed and that tax money invested in programs to help addicts get off drugs.

I always find it interesting that people who assume that the police and government can't possibly stop people from using these drugs assume that they can effectively regulate how they are produced. That doesn't seem to me to add up entirely.

But I think that ease of access is the chief thing to me. It's impossible for me to believe that legalization and government-regulated access won't lead to a heavy increase in use. Cheaper, easier to get hold of, and government-approved is a pretty good enticement. And I do believe that having much larger numbers of people using those drugs would be a social and economic catastrophe.

 

[LadynStFreknBed]

My daughter just said, "Think of this as Darwinism."
She's ruthless.

btw, yes, my daughter had a stash of pills, but I seriously doubt she had any intent of using them. She has Asperger's Syndrome (a type of autism). Attending a pill party or spending any time with peers would be the equivilant of medieval torture to her. Someone would get slapped.