DRUG RISK NO ONE TALKS ABOUT

An eighth-grader I know and love is in a rehab program. Her drug of choice?
Coricidin cold medicine.

Turns out she is not the only kid who has found a way to get high off the
products commonly found in our medicine cabinets and on drugstore shelves.
The number of calls to poison centers across the country about the abuse of
cold medicines containing dextromethorphan, or DXM, doubled in the last
three years, according to the American Association of Poison Control
Centers. In 2003, the centers took 4,382 calls about DXM -- 3,271 of which
involved teens. Separately, the U.S. Substance Abuse & Mental Health
Service Administration reports that 2,311 people were admitted to emergency
rooms in 2002 for over-the-counter medicine overdoses.

Experts at the Partnership for a Drug-Free America are in the midst of
surveying young people about their experience with drug use. For the first
time, the interviewers will ask whether the youths have abused
over-the-counter medicines.

Until they have that data, researchers aren't too worried about kids
abusing cold pills. They're much more concerned about kids abusing cleaning
products.

This practice, known among the hip set as "sniffing" or "huffing," involves
inhaling the poisons that are used to propel cooking spray, the fumes from
gasoline or any of 1,000 common household products.

The last survey of drug use conducted by the Partnership, released this
month, found a stunning one in four eighth-graders admit to having inhaled
household chemicals to get high. Even more shocking: Less than half of the
sixth-graders polled say they believe it can kill them.

How wrong they are.

This is a drug of choice for the middle-school set. Minor side effects
include headaches, muscle weakness and mood swings. But sniffing highly
concentrated amounts of some chemicals can be seriously harmful. It can
cause irreversible central nervous system or brain damage, liver and kidney
damage, even induce heart failure and death. On the first whiff.

As a parent of two soon-to-be middle schoolers, I'm officially freaked.
Will my kids look in my medicine cabinet when they want a little buzz? Or
under the sink where we keep the hard stuff?

While I was fretting over the news that Coricidin can kill (it's the
dextromethorphan in the cough and cold formulas that gives abusers the
high), the folks at the Partnership are much more worried about the
inhalant issue.

"None of these [inhaled] substances is designed for human consumption.
[Dextromethorphan] is; propane is not," said Steve Dnistrian, executive
vice president of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. "It's a scary
thing."

That's why his organization launched a national program in the mid-1990s to
let kids and parents know just how dangerous sniffing can be. There is no
similar scare for over-the-counter medicines. Yet.

In fact, the Partnership chose not to begin a national education and
awareness campaign about abuse of over-the-counter medicines.

"There's a fine line in this business of prevention: Do you wind up
educating kids about behavior you're trying to prevent," he said.

The Partnership sees abuse of dextromethorphan as "fringe behavior,"
Dnistrian said. One kid finds a Web site extolling the virtues of this
over-the-counter high and tells a few friends. So, rather than launch a
national media campaign, the group opted to fight a Web problem on the Web
with a site that shares the unappealing stories of kids who drank bottles
of cough syrup.

The key to protecting kids, he said, is to educate ourselves as parents. We
need to shake our unshakeable belief that it won't happen to our kids --
the one belief common to all parents, he said.

"When I go out to talk to a school, there are 50 parents there. When I go
out to talk to a school after an overdose, I get 300," Dnistrian said.

On the plus side, there is plenty of research telling us how to keep our
kids from using drugs. Key among those findings: Kids whose parents
regularly tell them about the risks of drugs are less likely to use them.

Or you could try the approach Dnistrian's dad used to keep him off drugs:
"He threatened to break my knees.