INHALANTS HOLD A HIDDEN THREAT FOR FAMILIES

Joan Hakeman is the first to admit she was clueless about her teenage
daughter's huffing problem. Like many parents, she had no idea that millions
of kids in the USA sniff glue, air freshener, spray paint and other common
household products to get high.

"I had never heard of huffing," she says. "And here our daughter was doing
it on a daily basis."

Megan, now 15, was one of the lucky ones. Her mom got her into treatment,
and now she's free of her habit.

According to the most recent National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, nearly
17 million Americans have tried huffing, or inhaling the intoxicating fumes
from common products.

Despite a decline in huffing since 1995, experts say millions of American
kids and teens try it at least once, and some of those will develop a habit.

"We call it the silent epidemic. It's just not recognized," says Harvey
Weiss, executive director of the National Inhalant Prevention Coalition, a
non-profit group based in Austin.

Kids can abuse more than 1,000 common household products. These products
contain volatile chemicals, such as toluene, that when inhaled offer a rush
that lasts for about 45 minutes.

These products are legal, cheap and easy-to-get.

"You can walk into Home Depot and walk out with a can of paint thinner,"
says Stephen Dewey, an inhalant researcher at the U.S. Department of
Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y.

Yet many parents don't realize how dangerous these products can be: A new
study by Dewey and his colleagues suggests that toluene triggers the brain's
pleasure centers the same way cocaine causes them to swing into action.

Serious Risks

Addiction is just one of the pitfalls for kids who sniff. Kids who try
huffing even once can die suddenly, and regular users can suffer brain
damage and other problems. Still, experts say that kids like Megan can and
do recover with treatment.

Megan says it was easy to hide her habit. She says her mom never noticed the
cans of air freshener around her room. Huffing became a regular after-school
activity for Megan, starting at age 13.

The experts say huffing often begins early in life - in some cases in grade
school. In fact, Dewey got started on his research when fourth-graders
bombarded him with questions about huffing at a drug education talk he was
giving at a local school. They asked him how huffing affects the brain, and
he couldn't give them a good answer because researchers, including the team
at Brookhaven, had been focusing their efforts on cocaine, ecstasy and other
high-profile drugs.

Dewey and his colleagues decided to change that with a study of baboons, an
animal with a brain similar to a human's. They gave these primates
injections of toluene, then took snapshots of the brain.

Within seconds, toluene zeros in on the pleasure regions of the baboon
brain, according to the findings published in the journal Life Sciences.

Like cocaine, toluene induces the brain to register feelings of euphoria,
Dewey says. The color snapshots, the first to show toluene's impact on the
brain, look just like those taken of humans who were high on cocaine.

Deaths Underestimated

This study backs up what users already know: Inhalants can become highly
addictive.

Many kids turn to inhalants as a cheap and easy way to get high. Yet huffing
can easily turn into a fatal mistake: Experts say that inhalants can trigger
a dangerously irregular heartbeat, even in first-time users.

"They seem in good shape - they may be laughing or giddy, and then several
minutes later they're dead," says Earl Siegel, co-director of the drug and
poison information center at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical
Center.

No one knows how many kids die from huffing. Many inhalant deaths get
written off as suicides or as accidents, Weiss says. The National Inhalant
Prevention Coalition gets reports of about 100 to 125 deaths a year caused
by huffing, but those numbers vastly underestimate the problem, he says.

Kids who huff also run the risk of brain damage that leads to memory and
learning problems, says H. Westley Clark, director of the Center for
Substance Abuse Treatment, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services.

Huffing can put kids at risk in the classroom. According to the National
Household Survey on Drug Abuse, teens 12 to 17 with a D average or below
were three times more likely to have huffed than their peers who were A
students.

But huffers do get better, if they get help.

A program in Huron, S.D., helped Megan. In fact, Joan Hakeman believes it
saved her daughter's life.

Megan went to Our Home Inc., a residential substance abuse program that up
until September ran a special unit just for huffers.

That program paid a lot of attention to the learning and reasoning
difficulties that huffers may have, says Steve Riedel, associate director of
Our Home. He says kids addicted to huffing often are combative and hard to
reach. But after several weeks of detox, such kids would emerge from their
huffing haze. That's when Riedel and his colleagues would teach them the
dangers of huffing.

To prevent backsliding in school, staffers there helped kids work on their
academic skills, including problem-solving. That emphasis seemed to pay off.

Financial Troubles

The average client at Our Home gained a year in test performance, a boost
that Riedel believes will help them in school and give them the confidence
they need to steer clear of huffing.

But Riedel had to shut the huffing program down - despite the fact that the
beds were almost always full with kids from all over the country. He says
Our Home ran the program with a grant for a while, but it couldn't afford to
keep it going when the grant money ran out. He says insurers usually don't
pay for the long stays that most huffers require.

Now there's only one program dedicated to treating huffers in the nation,
and it's located in Alaska.

In other parts of the USA, kids can get help from a regular drug program as
long as the counselors have had some experience treating huffers, Weiss
says.

Kids who've tried huffing once or twice may not need an expensive drug
treatment program. They do need parents who care.

When Megan went to Our Home, her mother never gave up hope. Megan says her
mom wrote her loving notes every single day - notes that pulled Megan
through a difficult time.

For her part, Joan Hakeman knows how hard her daughter has worked to build a
new life, one that doesn't include getting high.

"She's stayed clean," she says about Megan. "And I'm proud of her for that."