NEW HIGH ON CAMPUS: ILLICIT PRESCRIPTION DRUGS

HARTFORD, Connecticut - Unlike the typical array of drugs available to
college students looking to get high, the only thing illegal about those
that killed Josh Doroff, a Trinity College senior, last week was that Mr.
Doroff got them without a prescription.

The lethal combination he took - a cocktail of Xanax, Valium, butalbital
and sleeping pills, among other drugs - may have been extreme, but the
abuse of prescription drugs is an increasingly common form of drug abuse
for college and high school students across the United States, according to
drug experts around the country and dozens of students interviewed at eight
universities in the northeast this week.

Whether it is stimulants like Ritalin, Aderol and Dexedrine; painkillers
like Percocet, Percodan and Vicodin; migraine pills like butalbital;
tranquilizers like Xanax and Valium; or even powerful anti-psychotic agents
like Thorazine, the nation's growing list of prescribed drugs is finding
its way out of medicine cabinets and onto college campuses at a rate that
is troubling to many doctors and epidemiologists.

Most college students, of course, do not take prescription drugs illegally.
But nearly all students interviewed said that illicit prescription drugs
were available on campus.

Students said that they, or people they know, typically took them to
concentrate better on homework or exams, to stay awake during long nights
of drinking or, by mixing them with other drugs, to find a new high.

"Even if it feels bad, it's just that it's something that feels different,"
said Peter LaBier, an art major at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New
York. "There's just this urge with kids my age to derange your senses."

One preliminary study last year on the illicit use of Ritalin, conducted by
psychiatrists at the University of Wisconsin, found that a fifth of college
students interviewed had taken the drug at least once, and that many had
tried any number of other prescription drugs like Dexedrine, a stimulant.

"We had reports of students walking about the library asking, 'Does anybody
have any Dexedrine I can borrow tonight?"' said Dr. Eric Heiligenstein, the
psychiatrist who led the study.

Where students in previous eras relied on over-the-counter stimulants like
Vivarin, No-Doz or plain old coffee, more of today's students favor
spending as little as $2 to swallow, snort or inject prescription drugs to
study, stay awake or just feel good.

"A lot of people take Ritalin to study," said a student at Vassar who, like
many students interviewed for this article, refused to give her name. "It
makes you feel smart. And I think good thoughts when I use it."

Mike Ferraro, a senior English major at Rutgers University in New
Brunswick, New Jersey, said he knew many students who got prescription
drugs illegally. "Once you get bored with drug X," he said, "you can try
something new."

As reports grow of on-campus mixing and matching of prescription drugs, and
as more students like Mr. Doroff die as a result, school officials are
struggling to learn how students are acquiring and using these drugs.

"There's a lot of talk about it in the air now," said Marvin Geller, a
psychologist at McCosh Health Center at Princeton University. The increase
in the illicit use of Ritalin and Aderol, experts believe, corresponds to
the huge increase in recent years in the amounts of these drugs prescribed
by doctors to treat attention deficit and hyperactivity disorders.

"Certainly for Ritalin and Aderol, just the sheer availability of these
drugs makes them a temptation," said Dr. Tom Clark, an epidemiologist at
Health and Addictions Research Inc., a nonprofit organization in Boston.

Among young people, he said, "there seems to be more indiscriminate pill
popping."

Evidence of the increase in illegal use of Ritalin among students, though
still mostly anecdotal, parallels a more than eightfold increase in the
amount of methylphenidate, the drug's active ingredient, made between 1990
and this year, according to data from the federal Drug Enforcement
Administration.

Oxycodon, the active agent in Percocet and its cousin, Percodan, two
painkillers popular among students, is 10 times as plentiful as in 1990,
DEA data show.

Though Ritalin was the most popular prescription drug on Vassar's campus,
Mr. LaBier, 19, said he had heard of students taking potent drugs like
Thorazine, a powerful antipsychotic that doctors say makes most people feel
terrible.

Near Columbia University's campus, a 21-year-old student called Ritalin
"the poor man's cocaine" that, when swallowed or crushed and snorted,
helped his friends either study or stay awake during long nights of drinking.

"I know a lot of people that do it all the time," said the Columbia senior.
"I saw my friends crush up 10 pills of Ritalin and snort it. It's rampant here."