Teen Prescription Drug Abuse On the Rise

March 14, 2006 -- -- Jay was a nationally ranked tennis player, a good student, well-groomed. His parents had no idea he was going to school and to practice -- walking right past their faces -- stoned on prescription drugs.

"Percocets, Oxycontin, Xanax, Vicodin, Ritalin, Adderall," he said, reeling off a list of just some of the drugs he tried since he began abusing drugs at age 13.

Jay, now 17, 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. At first, he didn't want to be there.

He is not alone. According to psychiatrist Donald Hauser, The Right Step's medical director, pharmaceutical abuse is rampant among his young patients.

"By far, the most common trend I think we're seeing are sedative hypnotics, particularly Xanax -- 'bars' is what they call 'em -- and the opiates, the hydrocodone derivatives, the Vicodins, the Loracets," Hauser said.

"Almost every adolescent that comes in this program has used some of them."

National data support Hauser's observations. Last year's results of the Monitoring the Future study, an annual collaboration by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the University of Michigan, found a 26 percent rise in teenage abuse of Oxycontin -- a powerful opiate -- since 2002. Overall, the number of teens abusing prescription drugs has tripled since 1992.

There's no shortage of ways that teens obtain prescription drugs -- raiding home medicine cabinets, calling in a parent's prescription, forging signatures or surfing the Internet.

Jay said you could find just about anything by simply roving school hallways.

"It's so easy," he said. "You just have to go to a candy man, the guy who sells drugs."

There is a culture of anything goes. At so-called "pharm parties," teens drop an array of pills into a bowl, then pass around the "trail mix" for the partygoers to "graze."