INHALANT ABUSE ON THE RISE AMONG CHILDREN

Diane Stem of Old Hickory, Tenn., vividly remembers the day she was
called home by her distraught husband and daughter: Her 16-year-old
son, Ricky Joe Stem Jr., had been found dead in the house with a
plastic bag over his head. He had been sniffing Freon from the house's
air-conditioning system.

Marissa Manlove of Indianapolis got a call from a friend in June 2001
who told her that her 16-year-old son David Jefferis Manlove had dived
into a swimming pool and not come up. The teenager died after
breathing from a can of computer duster, using the nozzle as a straw
to suck the chemical toluene inside.

Toy Johnson Slayton of St. Simon's Island, Ga., remembers the police
coming to her home in December 2001 after her 17-year-old son Johnson
Bryant was found dead in his truck after going into cardiac arrest and
hitting a tree. A can of butane and a surgical glove were found with
the body -- police told her they believed her son had been "huffing."

"I looked at the man and said, 'What does that mean?' " she said. "I
am so angry because this was not on my radar screen. We had discussed
the dangers of drugs and alcohol, but never, ever in my wildest dreams
had I known to look at a can of butane with fear."

A hidden epidemic is gaining momentum in America, experts say.
Children as young as fourth-graders are deliberately inhaling the
fumes of dangerous chemicals from a variety of household and office
products. Inhalants, as they are known, are widely available and hard
to detect, and are fueling a dangerous trend: The most reliable annual
survey of drug use among children has found that inhalants are the one
group of drugs in which abuse is on the rise.

The chemicals travel rapidly to the brain to produce highs similar to
alcohol intoxication. Unlike the effect of alcohol, these highs
disappear within minutes, making it hard for parents to detect the
abuse.

The products, which can range from gasoline to cigarette lighter
fluid, cleaning supplies to adhesives, are often highly toxic and addictive.

New brain imaging research has shown that the chemicals can produce
lasting changes in the brain, as well as heart, kidney and liver damage.

The new brain imaging research also shows that different inhalants
affect different parts of the brain, which might be why children
report preferences. "Some kids like to huff acetone, some like to huff
toluene and some like butane," said Stephen Dewey, a researcher at the
Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York.

Some indications suggest the problem may be growing faster among
girls. Overall, nearly one in five eighth-graders has tried an
inhalant, usually by breathing from a rag or a bag doused with the
chemical. The increase in abuse has tracked a sharp drop in
youngsters' perceptions of the risks of inhalants, said Lloyd
Johnston, a researcher at the University of Michigan who helps conduct
the annual "Monitoring the Future" survey of eighth-, 10th- and
12th-graders.

Parents seem to know little about the trend.

"It completely caught us off guard," said Diane Stem of Ricky's death.
"He was a great kid, a great athlete; we have a loving supportive
home; we had warned him about drugs and alcohol, but we didn't know to
warn him about inhalants."

In retrospect, say these parents, they ought to have been more
worried.

"Not every family has crack cocaine under their sinks, but every
family has cleaning products under their sinks," Stem said.

Data show that inhalant abuse among children is growing in all parts
of the country. Use is highest among whites, followed closely by
Hispanics, and is lower among blacks. The problem afflicts children
from all socioeconomic backgrounds, and from families with both high
and low levels of parental education.

But stereotypes about who abuses inhalants and the stigma associated
with the practice have kept many parents from believing that the
problem could affect them and blinded them to warning signs, said
Slayton, Johnson Bryant's mother.

"Looking back, there was an episode where I went in a playroom and
found a surgical glove and thought, 'What is the cleaning service
leaving a glove for?' " she said. Her son Johnson was filling the
gloves with butane and inhaling from them. "He had a heavy cough. He
had bouts of belligerence. The stigma of inhalants is what kept me
from being aware."

Harvey Weiss, executive director of the nonprofit National Inhalant
Prevention Coalition in Austin, said that increasing the visibility of
inhalant abuse could reduce abuse. Such campaigns in the early 1990s
in Texas brought abuse rates down, but the prevention programs were
eliminated in 1995. "Inhalant rates in Texas went back up again," he
said.

"We've seen a significant increase in inhalant use by eighth-graders
in this country," agreed Nora D. Volkow, director of the National
Institute on Drug Abuse, at a recent meeting in Washington organized
by the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America.

Abuse often starts early. By the fourth grade, about one in 25
children has tried an inhalant; by the sixth grade, the rate is one in
10; by eighth grade, it is nearly one in five, Johnston and other
researchers report. Inhalant use among eighth-graders is second only
to cigarettes and alcohol in drug use.

Although rates seem to be increasing for both boys and girls, experts
are especially worried about the sharp increase among girls. But
surveys show that boys are more likely to become heavy users.

No single test can detect all of the inhalants, and experts believe
that many deaths linked to abuse go unreported or are listed as
accidents. Abuse can lead to cardiac arrest, which some experts call
"sudden sniffing syndrome."

"If a young person is breathing from a rag or a bag and they get
grossly intoxicated within seconds, they then may pass out, fall
forward with their face in the bag or in the rag, and then they are
going to continue to breathe these fumes and overdose," said Robert
Balster, a scientist at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.
"It is like turning on an anesthesia machine in an operating room and
then walking away."

Some parents fear that anti-inhalant campaigns might unintentionally
suggest the idea, or specific techniques, to children who do not know
about them. But ignorance may be the bigger problem, said Weiss and
parents whose children had died. It is the parents, not the children,
who seem to be in the dark, they said.