THESE DAYS, THE DRUGS OF CHOICE FOR MANY TEENS ARE THE PILLS THAT ADULTS
TAKE

Ryan Smith remembers the night, during his junior year of high school,
when a friend gave him his first Vicodin.

"It felt so incredible. I remember thinking, 'I am going to do this
for the rest of my life,' " he says.

Over the next year, Smith, now 22, and his friends moved on to other
pills - Xanax, Valium, OxyContin and the attention deficit disorder
medication Adderall, called "kiddie cocaine" for its ability to be
crushed and snorted.

"At the time, it felt like I knew more kids who were doing pills than
who weren't," he says of his high school days.

Daniel Smith, his younger brother, began using prescription drugs the
same way when a friend offered him Vicodin while watching a school
football game during his sophomore year. By that summer, he began
taking "weak painkillers" such as Lortab and Percocet. Finally, he
turned to highly addictive OxyContin, using it several times a week.

Although the brothers eventually went through an addiction program in
Utah, they never considered themselves "druggies." They were using
pills safe enough to be used by millions of Americans, drugs both
legal and easy to get.

Each generation typically finds a new illicit drug to make its own:
LSD in the '70s, cocaine in the '80s and Ecstasy and heroin in the
'90s. Today's middle and high school students are experimenting with
prescription drugs.

Their drugs of choice are those often preferred by adults. After
amphetamines such as Ritalin, they're turning to painkillers such as
Vicodin and Percocet, then sedatives and tranquilizers.

Nationwide, prescription pills have become a societal force. Adults
and children rely on them for a growing list of afflictions, including
anxiety, depression, even shyness, for which few alternatives were
available a generation ago. Nearly half of all Americans take at least
one prescription drug.

Meanwhile, direct-to-consumer drug marketing that touts new and
expanded uses has become widespread. Adults and children alike are
exposed to print, television and radio ads promising happier, more
fulfilled lives. For young people, experts say, all these factors
appear to have blurred the line between the benefits and dangers of
the medications.

As prescription drug sales have soared - up nearly 400 percent since
1990 - prescription medication has become the fastest-growing category
of drugs being abused, with the biggest growth of abuse among people
ages 12 to 24, according to the federal Substance Abuse and Mental
Health Services Administration. After marijuana, prescription drugs
are the drugs most commonly abused by teenagers, the federal agency
says.

Nationally, an estimated 14 percent of high school seniors have used
prescription drugs for non-medical reasons at least once in their
lifetime, according to a 2004 University of Michigan survey that
tracks drug trends among middle and high school students.

"It's a major concern to us that young people have the impression they
can use medicine as a party drug," says Dr. H. Westley Clark, director
of the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment at the Department of
Health and Human Services.

'Less illegal'

The rise in prescription abuse - or "pharming" as young people and
drug counselors sometimes call it - worries treatment counselors and
drug research experts. A national push to reduce drugs such as
marijuana, cocaine and heroin has started to pay off, with overall
drug use among young adults declining slightly in recent years. But
abuse of prescription drugs - especially among younger people often
dubbed the "Ritalin generation" - has been growing and could grow
further as drug sales continue to increase.

"Pills are more seductive to kids because they see them as cleaner,
safer and less illegal," says Carol Falkowski, a drug researcher at
Hazelden, a nationally known treatment center in Minnesota.

Many younger users don't know what many of the drugs are for or which
pills are more addictive than others, Falkowski says. Nor do they have
much sense of what dosages are truly dangerous or how separate drugs
interact. Are four Percocets worse than two Vicodin? Can Valium be
mixed with Xanax? Treatment counselors say some young users take a
fistful of different drugs at once.

Data from the federal Drug Abuse Warning Network show that visits to
hospital emergency departments increased significantly from 1994 to
2002 for overdoses of drugs such as narcotic prescription pain
relievers and other medications.

Although the data isn't broken down by age group, overdoses of
hydrocodone, or Lortab, for example, rose 170 percent; overdoses of
oxycodone, or OxyContin, increased 450 percent; and overdoses of
benzodiazepines such as Valium and Xanax rose 41 percent. Data also
show that many were using more than one drug.

In face-to-face and telephone interviews with students at several
middle and high schools in California, students say prescription drug
use is frequently talked about at school but rarely discussed elsewhere.

Prescription drugs are often more attractive than other drugs, they
say, because the pills don't have the telltale signs of use, such as
the smell of marijuana smoke or the disorientation of being drunk.

Girls in particular appear to see the pills as "cleaner" than other
drugs. They're less likely to use marijuana or cocaine than boys but
equally likely to take prescription medications.

Some students see the pills as a way to enhance sports performance.
They say football players at some schools take opiates such as Vicodin
before games to blunt the pain.

Some schools have sophisticated black markets with fixed prices for
individual drugs and dosages that vary according to supply and demand.

Students say prescription pills can often be less expensive than other
drugs such as marijuana and cocaine. Pain pills such as Vicodin sell
for around $5, depending on the dose, while stronger medications such
as OxyContin can cost several times that. Ritalin, one of the most
widely available drugs, sells for $1 to $2 a pill, students say, but
can be more expensive before midterms and finals, when students use
them to cram.