MEDIA HYPE ABOUT PAINKILLERS SHOT DOWN

Shira Hassan has read the research that says prescription drug use is
up among young people.

But annual reports like the government-funded " Monitoring the
Future" don't often reflect what she sees working with 12- to
23-year-old women in Chicago's sex trade, said Hassan, co-director of
the Young Women's Empowerment Project.

These young women don't reflect the reported youth opiate craze, and
painkillers like OxyContin and Vicodin aren't in unusually high demand.

"Spikes are media-driven," said Hassan, whose group is rooted in the
principles of harm reduction. "The spike is more of a spike in the research."

Authors of the University of Michigan study, a composite of 50,000
8th-, 10th- and 12th-graders' disclosures about their drug use,
started asking about OxyContin and Vicodin in 2002. And 2006 was the
first year they included questions about over-the-counter cold
medicines, as though sippin' on some [cough] syrup were brand new.

Last year, peer outreach workers with the Young Women's Empowerment
Project talked to more than 400 girls in the Chicago area who were
trading sex for money or drugs. More than half of those conversations
were about drug use.

What they're using is what Hassan has seen consistently over the
years: marijuana and alcohol are most prevalent, followed by crystal
meth, heroin, ecstasy, powder cocaine and other club drugs.

"I haven't met a kid who their primary passion is pills in a long
time," Hassan said.

Where prescription drugs like Xanax, Valium and Ativan do come into
play is in combination with other drugs. These pills are
benzodiazepines, the "downers" that calm the nerves or ward off a
crash as the high from cocaine or meth subsides.

But if this is new to researchers, it isn't to users.

"That's been going on since the beginning of time," Hassan said.

What is relatively new is recreational prescription drug use among
the population university researchers can access easily: middle-class
teenagers who go to school.

And among this group, yes, access to parents' pain pills and the
exchange of Adderall and other drugs prescribed for attention-deficit
disorder and depression are increasingly common, said Marsha
Rosenbaum, a medical sociologist and director of Drug Policy
Alliance's Safety First project.

The 2006 University of Michigan study reports that 9 percent of high
school seniors had used a prescription narcotic in the previous year,
compared to the just over 4 percent who had used ecstasy.

One reason for this comparatively high use is the medical community's
shifting approach to pain management, Rosenbaum said.

"You have a little surgery, you get some pills," she said of young
people's access to adult family members' prescriptions. "To doctors
these days, Vicodin is like aspirin."

Rosenbaum doesn't suggest restricting people's ability to alleviate
their pain, but she does say parents should throw away or lock up
their unused meds. Even more important is realistic drug education
that teaches young people to reduce harms associated with drugs if
they do choose to use them, she said.

And because young people know exactly what they're putting in their
bodies when they use prescription drugs recreationally, Dan Bigg of
the Chicago Recovery Alliance sees their use a sign that more young
people are taking the principles of harm reduction to heart.

With these drugs, there's less of a crapshoot around how much to take
or potentially dangerous fillers.

"The Internet provides a wealth of information," Bigg said. "It's
easy to read about it and understand dosage. You have an opportunity
to do that, that you don't [have) with illicit drugs."

Of course, abuse can still be a problem. Ninety minutes north of
Chicago in Racine, Wis., Sammy Rangel is seeing the young people --
mostly white boys -- who get caught stealing cough medicine from
local pharmacies. He also sees the teenagers hooked on OxyContin.

A director of the street outreach program at Racine's SAFE Haven
youth shelter and a licensed drug and alcohol counselor, Rangel
shares Hassan's skepticism that there's a recent spike in
prescription and over-the-counter drug abuse. He doesn't see it among
the population he works with: primarily black and Latino youth
between the ages of 13 and 25.

The biggest change he's seen in the last year is the increase in
young black men snorting heroin.

"That was something I hadn't seen in a long time," Rangel said. "You
worried about a kid getting a hold of crack."

This trend follows a boom in heroin sales in nearby Kenosha in the
early 2000s, and now the drug is big among 16- to 25-year-old black
men, Rangel said. They're adamant that they never shoot the drug, but
he thinks a stigma often forces injection users into silence.

"You're a partier or a casual user if you're snorting it, but you're
a dope fiend if you're shooting up," Rangel said.

Marijuana is big among the younger teenagers he works with, which is
no surprise except he thinks the volume -- some talk about smoking an
eighth of an ounce every hour or two that can have long-lasting
effects, including severe memory loss and motor skill deterioration.
Rangel said the glorification of blunts in pop culture is partly to
blame for skewing conversations around moderation.

"Nobody talks about joints anymore. I think they get laughed at," he
said. "It's one thing to smoke marijuana, it's another thing to
saturate your system."

Rangel also worries about the crack cocaine and PCP that sometimes
make their way into blunts.

But Googling prescription drugs isn't the only way to steer clear of
unforeseen toxins. At the Young Women's Empowerment Project, people
do still talk about joints, and on a recent day Hassan overheard a
13-year-old girl asking how to tell whether one had been rolled using
papers laced with embalming fluid.

A 19-year-old colleague of Hassan's used the peer education model on
which the organization prides itself. Without judgment, without
shaming the girl into clamming up, the staffer started brainstorming
ways the younger girl could stay safe.

Hassan watched the two puzzle through the problem together:

"If you're out with a guy, don't let him smoke you up," the colleague
suggested. "Roll from your bag. Don't carry too much. Teach yourself
how to be in charge of your drug use."

Dani McClain is a reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She
serves on WireTap's advisory board.