Experts note that whereas teens once raided their parents’ liquor cabinet in order to experience a high, they’ve now progressed to the much more dangerous habit of raiding the medicine cabinet to locate legal prescription drugs that they can share with their friends.
Experts note that “pharming parties are a new social twist that contributes to the growing problem of prescription drug abuse, which has worked its way into pop culture via message boards, song lyrics and even T-shirts.
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Columbia University's National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse notes that about 2.3 million kids, 12 to 17, took prescription drugs illegally in the past year, based on 2003 figures. That's a 212 percent increase from the early 1990s.
Doctors and other mental health experts blame the trend on easy access. As more and more adults turn to prescription pain relievers and an abundance of other readily-prescribed drugs such as pills for anxiety and depression, kids can easily assume ownership of whatever happens to be in the family’s medicine cabinet, especially when the pills are “forgotten” by the one for whom they were intended, usually a parent.
Some kids, particularly those diagnosed with ADHD, are also eager to make a few bucks on their own prescription drugs, such as Ritalin and Adderall.
The fact that kids often alter the ways these drugs are to be taken increases the risk even further. For example, they may crush the pills to achieve a quick high, even though many of these medications are meant to be slowly absorbed into the blood stream. That leads to dangerous changes in heart rhythm and much more.
