COLD MEDICINE ABUSE SPREADING AMONG YOUTHS, OFFICIALS FIND

Three Contra Costa County Students Treated For Overdoses

Sweetly fruity cough syrup, liqui-gels and other over-the-counter cold
medications seem so innocuous. They ease coughs and lower fevers.
Heck, Mom gives them to you.

But recreational use of massive quantities of Coricidin Cough and Cold
reportedly sent two teens at Las Lomas High School in Walnut Creek to
the emergency room two weeks ago. In Lafayette, a Stanley Middle
School student ingested 16 Coricidin tablets and had to be
hospitalized.

``We've known about drug-oriented abuse for some time,'' said Kent
Olson, medical director of California Poison Control's San Francisco
division, about Coricidin abuse. ``It's pretty wild stuff, but kind of
sporadic. We see little clusters.''

One of those clusters hit Walnut Creek high schools last year, and Las
Lomas and Lafayette officials are concerned that a trend may be
emerging. All three students recovered, but Las Lomas principal Pat
Lickiss worries that what may seem like harmless fun could have tragic
consequences.

Lickiss contacted parents to warn them ``about a troubling trend that
some high school students in Walnut Creek and around the country are
engaging in.'' He directed them to a U.S. Department of Justice Web
site with information on this kind of drug abuse, and a People
Magazine article about students who had died while using
dextromethorphan.

Cough and cold medications such as Coricidin and Robitussin contain
dextromethorphan -- DXM. Approved by the Food and Drug Administration
as a cough suppressant in 1958, DXM became popular as a recreational
drug in the 1980s, particularly among the punk set.

But DXM abuse has moved into the mainstream and, according to a 2001
California Poison Control report, Coricidin abuse is highest among
teens, ages 13 to 17.

Medications usually taken to relieve fever and dispel coughs at normal
doses are being used for something quite different. Taken in large
quantity, DXM causes a euphoric high that Olson says is similar to
PCP, although the actual drug is more related to opium-like compounds.

Recreational users ingest 10 to 20 cold tablets, or even more. They
drain half the cough syrup bottle.

The latter is quite a feat. Normally, that much cough syrup would
induce vomiting, so abusers must down it quickly enough to absorb the
DXM before the sticky fluid reverses course -- hence, the interest in
Coricidin and other tablet-style medications.

But what concerns doctors most about this type of drug abuse is that
these medications contain other things. Coricidin Cough and Cold, for
example, contains chlorpheniramine maleate, an antihistamine.
Overdoses can cause severe and even fatal liver damage.

Contac Severe Cold & Flu's ingredients include DXM, acetaminophen and
pseudoephedrin. Swallow 20 Contac caplets and you might as well have
swallowed 20 extra-strength Tylenols in one sitting.

Las Lomas school officials started hearing about the problem last year
from Walnut Creek police officers and colleagues at other high
schools. They searched Google.com to gather more information. So when
two students arrived in the Las Lomas nurse's office exhibiting
symptoms -- typically, slurred speech, difficulty walking, nausea --
administrators immediately called Poison Control.

``All of a sudden in the last week, we're hearing about it,'' said
Associate Principal Kevin Collins. ``The students were fairly lucid,
but once we realized what was going on, we called.''