Popping Pills Latest Trend in Teen Drug Abuse

Feb. 13, 2008 -- When actor Heath Ledger died from what the coroner called an accidental overdose of prescription drugs, it got us to thinking about a story we first reported on two years ago: Teens abusing prescription drugs.

This disturbing trend has been increasingly well documented, as we saw when we visited a rehabilitation facility in Houston back then and met a young man named Jay.

Jay, then 17, had been a nationally ranked tennis player and a good student. His parents had no idea he was abusing prescription drugs. Despite years of his using an array of drugs, Jay's mother said her son seemed normal.

"He was still making good grades," she said, "still playing tennis. He looked like Mr. All-American, so who would think?"

What drugs, we wondered?

So Jay reeled them off: "Percocets, Oxycontin, Xanax, Vicodin, Ritalin, Adderall." Those were just a few of the drugs with which he had experimented, starting at age 13.

Jay said he had "black eyes" and "lost a lot of weight" and probably hadn't showered in a month when he checked into The Right Step, a small drug and alcohol treatment clinic in Houston.

Jay's story was not unique. The Right Step's adolescent program coordinator, Ernest Patterson, a former NBA star and a recovering addict himself, says abuse of pharmaceuticals was and is rampant among his young patients.

"Most of the kids that come here have actually experimented with Xanax," said Patterson. "They get it off the streets, or even sometimes the medication is prescribed to their parents and they're able to get into the medicine cabinet or to their mom's purse. And they're taking medication, and they just take it illegally."

How serious is the problem of prescription drug abuse among teens? "I still see kids that come to our facility, they continue to smoke marijuana," said Patterson. "But the majority of the kids that come here, most of them are prescription medications — that's their drug of choice."

National data supports Patterson's experience with young addicts. The Office of National Drug Control Policy says that while overall teen drug use is down nationwide, more teens abuse prescription drugs than any other illicit drug except marijuana. It claims that every day, 2,500 kids age 12-17 abuse prescription painkillers for the first time, and more people are getting addicted to prescription drugs.