AMERICAN KIDS GETTING HIGH ON PRESCRIPTION DRUGS

BOSTON (Reuters) - When Paul Michaud's father died of cancer, the
16-year-old took OxyContin to ease his emotional pain.

He first snorted the prescription painkiller and within weeks he was
injecting it into his veins for a more powerful high before turning
to heroin as a cheaper option.

"It was the one drug that really pulled me. It took away everything,"
said Michaud, now 18, one of a new generation of American children
getting high on and addicted to prescription drugs.

Teenagers are increasingly experimenting with legal drugs like
OxyContin, widely known as "hillbilly heroin," and Vicodin, often
bought online or taken from medicine cabinets, even before trying
marijuana or alcohol, health officials say.

"Last year, painkillers were the No. 1 drug for people taking drugs
for the first time," said Nora Volkow, director of the National
Institute on Drug Abuse, an arm of the government's National
Institutes of Health.

"It's been escalating and escalating," she said. "In the past, the
No. 1 drug for new initiates was marijuana."

Michaud, who attended a Boston area high school, was caught stealing
to pay for what he described as his almost instant addiction to
OxyContin -- which can cost $80 to $100 for a 40 mg pill. He was then
checked into a drug and alcohol clinic.

He has since been in and out of rehab programs six times.

"It destroyed my life pretty much. I haven't seen any of my teenage
years," he said from the Phoenix House, a clinic in the western
Massachusetts city of Springfield, where he says he has been clean
for 50 days.

Michaud is not alone. Last year's Monitoring the Future study,
produced jointly by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the
University of Michigan, found a 38-percent rise in abuse of OxyContin
among 18-year-olds between 2002 and 2005.

While overall drug use dropped 19 percent over the past four years,
about one in 10 teenagers were abusing prescription drugs, the survey showed.

"Pharming Parties"

Among the most dangerous experiments are "pharming parties" where
children meet after scouring family medicine cabinets and dumping
what they find into a bowl. They stir things up, dip in, randomly
pluck drugs out and swallow them.

"They literally do not know what they are taking," said Michael Rich,
director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Children's
Hospital in Boston.

"They can overdose or take medications that counteract with each
other or interact with each other in dangerous ways. When you combine
the anti-anxiety drug Klonopin for example with alcohol, they work in
the same way and can very much lower the threshold at which you stop
breathing," he said.

Volkow at the National Institute on Drug Abuse said many teens
associate prescription drugs with family doctors, and consider them
safe, or have had positive experiences with properly prescribed
medication in their early childhood.

The challenge, she said, is to control abuse without banning drugs
that do more good than harm to society. OxyContin, which is sold
generically and generates about $2 billion in annual sales, is widely
used in hospitals.

The issue grabbed public attention in Boston after the suicide in
January of 17-year-old Cameron O'Connor, who shot himself in the head
a day after taking Klonopin. His death in Boston's middle-class
Arlington suburb triggered calls for better ways to detect teen abuse
of prescription drugs.

Teenagers are not the only prescription drug abusers. The number of
people over the age of 55 treated for abuse of opiates, for example,
has nearly doubled between 1995 and 2002, government statistics show.
In 2003, conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh admitted becoming
hooked on OxyContin.

"We're also seeing an increase in the use of these drugs in young
adults," said Lloyd Johnston, lead investigator at Michigan's
Institute for Social Research, which researches the government's
700-page Monitoring the Future study.