STUDY: TEEN ABUSE OF PAINKILLERS A PERSISTENT ILL

Teen drug use continues its overall decline, but that progress does
not extend to powerful prescription painkillers, such as OxyContin and
Vicodin, a new national study shows.

The report, which President Bush will make public today, found the
highly addictive narcotic painkillers that imitate morphine remain as
popular as ever among the nearly 50,000 teens surveyed. Painkiller
abuse is second only to marijuana use, according to the survey by the
University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research, funded by the
National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Drugs with some of the steepest declines in use over the past five
years are marijuana, Ritalin and methamphetamine. For example, in
1999, the year the survey began tracking methamphetamine use, 4.7% of
high school seniors said they had used the stimulant in the past year.
This year, 1.7% reported doing so.

Such declines have driven overall usage data down significantly from
their peak years in the late 1990s. In 1997, 42.4% of high school
seniors reported using some type of illicit drug in the previous year,
compared with 35.9% of seniors this year.

Eighth-graders showed the sharpest decline overall in reporting
past-year drug use, decreasing from 14.8% in 2006 to 13.2% this year.

Meanwhile, the number of teens who reported using OxyContin in the
past year has increased 30% since 2002, when survey researchers first
asked about the drug. OxyContin use this year ticked up slightly among
high school seniors to 5.2%, from 4.3% in 2006.

One out of 10 high school seniors reported using Vicodin in the past
year, a rate that has not changed significantly since the 2002 survey.

Marijuana remains the most widely used drug. One in 10 eighth-graders,
one in four 10th-graders and nearly one in three 12th-graders say they
smoked marijuana in the past year. Use among eighth-graders declined
from 11.7% in 2006 to 10.3% in 2007, while use in other grades
remained steady.

Use of over-the-counter cough medicine to get high also remained
steady at 4% of eighth-graders, 5.4% of sophomores and 5.8% of seniors.

The University of Michigan study, in its 33rd year, surveyed 48,025
students in eighth, 10th and 12th grade in 403 public and private schools.