A STEALTH EPIDEMIC

Drugs: many teens hunting for an easy high have died after 'huffing'
inhalants.The extent of the problem isn't widely recognized.

Media,Pa.-Five best friends gather to make a high school health video
about the dangers of smoking and drugs. Ten days later, the girls are
killed when their car plows into a utility pole. In the bloodstreams
of four, including the driver, are traces of the chemical
difluoroethane.

Inside the crumpled car, troopers find a can of Duster 11, a spray
used to clean computer keyboards. Its ingredients include
difluoroethane.

The coroner's findings put the teens on a list of 240 people who have
died from "huffing" inhalants since 1996, according to the National
Inhalant Prevention Coalition.

The parents of the girls remain stunned. Last week, they released a
statement disputing the findings and suggesting their daughters might
have inhaled "the airborne agent" unintentionally.

But studies and doctors who treat teen-agers say their subjects tell
them that huffing, also called "sniffing" or "wanging," is the easiest
high to get and is far easier to conceal than the rush from alcohol,
marijuana or tobacco.

It's cheap. It's intense. There are no dealers, no pipes, no needles,
no track marks. Some teens paint their fingernails with typewriter
correction fluid, then sniff their fingers all day. Some soak their
sleeves in solvent and sniff away, with no one the wiser.

Wade Heiss' preferred means was sniffing air freshener in the back
room of his house in Bakersfield. Two days before Christmas 1995, his
older brother caught him in the act. Wade was startled. Moments later,
he hell to the floor. His heart had stopped.

Wade was dead at age 12.

"Yeah, I heard about this huffing," says Dr.Richard Heiss, Wade's
father, a family practitioner. "But even I didn't know the effects of
it, and I'm a medical doctor. Nobody's telling parents about it. Why
isn't someone screaming and yelling about this?"

Studies rank huffing fourth among all forms of substance abuse by
teens. And what many teens and parents don't realize is that huffing
can kill, even the first time, says Harvey Weiss, founder of the
National Inhalant Prevention Coalition in Austin, Texas.

More than 1,000 products containing "euphoriant" inhalants are widely
available, including vegetable cooking spray and deodorant, Weiss
says, and the number of easy-to-get chemicals to sniff is growing and
changing with time.

"I call it a silent epidemic," Weiss says. "Right now, there's barely
any public awareness out there. And in the young person's mind, how
can they think this is dangerous if they're not told? They think it's
just household stuff."

Most inhalants produce their effects by depressing the central nervous
system and slowing the heart, sometimes to an irregular beat. If a
user becomes anxious or frightened, the resultant adrenaline release
can kick the heart into even more inefficient rhythms, to the point
that blood and oxygen no longer reach the brain.

A federal study of users age 12 through adulthood estimated that new
users of inhalants in 1997 had increased to 805,000, from 380,000 in
1991. The study, by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration of the Department of Health and Human Services, said
most new users were 12-17.