PHARMING FAD ON RISE

Prescription Pill-Popping Parties Are Increasing Among Youth

Drug counselors across the United States are beginning to hear about
pill-popping parties, which are part of a rapidly developing
underground culture that surrounds the increasing 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 collecting pills from the family
medicine chest is called "pharming."

Pharm parties 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," said Carol Falkowski, director of
research communications for the Hazelden Foundation. Central Ohio
Drug Enforcement Task Force Capt. Bruce Myers said he doesn't know of
any type of prescription medication not being abused in Licking
County. He said Percocet commonly is abused.

"I think you're going to see a lot of kids involved in it because
younger and younger kids are experimenting with prescriptions they
can get their hands on," Myers said. "Maybe from their parents, maybe
their grandparents."

Myers said they are starting their drug experimentation with what is
readily available to them.

Prescription pills have become popular among youths because they
represent a more socially acceptable way of getting high than taking
street drugs, Falkowski said.

In a 2005 survey by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, 19
percent of U.S. teenagers -- roughly 4.5 million youths -- reported
having taken prescription painkillers such as Vicodin or OxyContin or
stimulants such as Ritalin of 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 percent of
12th-graders had used it in the previous year. About 5.5 percent said
they had used OxyContin. Both drugs are more popular among high
school seniors than Ecstasy and cocaine.

The 2005 partnership survey found more than three in five teens
easily can obtain prescription painkillers from their parents'
medicine cabinets.

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 in May.

Myers said deaths have occurred in the county from prescription
overdoses: one near Reynoldsburg and another near Hebron.

"In one case they were properly prescribed," he said. "In the other
case they were stolen and friends were passing them around for a
high, and ultimately one of them died."

A tricky part of the prescription-drug problem is addressing the
perception among youths that pills are safe because they are
"medicine," said Catherine Harnett, chief of demand reduction for the
Drug Enforcement Administration. Many teens don't equate taking such
pills with using drugs such as heroin or cocaine, Harnett 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."

Myers said he doesn't doubt pharm parties and gatherings like them
have occurred in the area, but he couldn't cite any specific examples.

"It's something we need to spend more time working on, it really is,"
Myers said. "It's just the staffing level that we have to work with,
not the number of cases to work."