Prescription abusers not just after a high

Daniel Ashkenazy, a promising pre-law student at the University of California, San Diego, had planned to fly home to the San Francisco Bay Area to see his visiting grandparents on Jan. 14. Instead, he died that day after taking the addictive painkiller OxyContin and then drinking alcohol at a fraternity rush party.

'I believe that those kids who are high achievers are the kids who are at risk,' Pamela Ashkenazy, seen here with her son Daniel, says.
Family photo via AP

Daniel's mother, Pamela Ashkenazy, found her son's misuse of a prescription drug puzzling. Daniel, 20, had a 3.8 grade-point average his junior year. He spoke with her nearly every day. He didn't seem to fit the profile of a young person who might drift into drug abuse, she said. But in the four months since Daniel's death, Ashkenazy has reached a different conclusion about the type of teens and young adults who abuse prescription drugs.

"I believe that those kids who are high achievers are the kids who are at risk," she says. "Parents think if they are raising their kids in affluent homes, if their kids are getting good grades, nothing is wrong. Well, none of that protected him."

The Ashkenazy case reflects what various university researchers are finding as they begin to examine an emerging boom in prescription-drug abuse among young adults and teenagers: Many of those who misuse narcotic pain relievers such as OxyContin or Vicodin, or stimulants such as Ritalin, are doing so not necessarily to get high, but also to ease stress or to try to improve academic performance.

Popular pills

Prescription drugs most often abused by teenagers and young adults include:
Ritalin. A mild stimulant often prescribed to children to treat attention deficit disorder (ADD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and narcolepsy. Abusers take it to suppress appetite, stay awake and feel euphoric.

;OxyContin. A strong pain reliever similar to morphine. Highly addictive, it is designed to be absorbed gradually. Crushing or chewing pills can cause a large amount of oxycodone, the active ingredient, to be released at once. That creates the potential for a dangerous or fatal overdose.

Vicodin. A strong pain reliever that can be addictive. It is particularly popular among young adults. Its use among professional athletes was spotlighted when Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre was treated for an addiction to the drug in 1996.

Percocet. A painkiller that can be addictive. It's often given to patients who have undergone surgery.

Morphine. Another addictive painkiller that is known for its use on patients who have undergone surgery. It is a base ingredient for many other painkillers, including OxyContin.

Sources: National Institute on Drug Abuse, Center for Drug Evaluation and Research

Patterns of use and abuse

Recent nationwide surveys by the University of Michigan and other researchers have indicated that the abuse of prescription drugs among young adults and teens is increasing, while the abuse of drugs such as cocaine and heroin is decreasing among those groups. The studies have said that about 6.7 million people ages 12-25 took a prescription drug for non-medical purposes during the previous year. Among illicit drugs, only marijuana had more users in that age group, about 12.8 million.

On Wednesday, the Society for Prevention Research, a group of scientists who examine drug abuse and recommend ways to counter it, presented analyses and original research based on such data collected during the past three years. Carol Boyd, director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan, said researchers are beginning to understand which youths abuse prescription drugs, why they do so and where they get the drugs.

Sean Esteban McCabe, interim director of the Substance Abuse Research Center at the University of Michigan, said his colleagues' examination of drug use among college students found that "competitive" universities ? those with high academic standards ? reported higher rates of illicit use of prescription drugs.

McCabe did not identify specific campuses with high usage rates. However, he said researchers have found students are more likely to abuse prescription drugs if they are white, live in a fraternity or sorority house and have lower than a "B" average.

McCabe also found that young women who used prescription drugs illicitly usually got them from family members, particularly parents, while young men who used such drugs without prescriptions usually got them from friends.

Meanwhile, Boyd surveyed 1,017 middle and high school students in a Detroit-area public school district. Almost half the children had legitimate prescriptions for Ritalin and other medications. Ritalin is a stimulant used to treat attention deficit disorder.

Among the students surveyed by Boyd's group, one in four with legitimate prescriptions said other kids had asked them for pills. One in five said they had sold or traded away at least one pill. Most of the students who reported using such drugs without a prescription ? 79% ? said they had done so to relieve pain rather than to get high, Boyd says. About 11% said they took the drugs to get high.

Boyd says the survey indicates that "when we talk about this big boom in prescription-drug abuse, we have to talk about two different groups who are using the drugs for two different reasons."

'Not like when you're drunk'

In a separate study at the University of New Mexico, Gilbert Quintero and other researchers at the university's Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention recently interviewed 52 college students who said they had misused prescription drugs during the previous year.

Quintero found that many of the students medicated themselves to relieve stress. The students identified 58 different brand names of drugs they had misused. Vicodin was the most popular, with 65.4% saying they had used it without a prescription, followed by Percocet, the tranquilizers Valium and Xanax, and OxyContin.

Quintero quoted a 20-year-old woman who had misused Percocet, a painkiller. "It just relaxes me," she told the researchers. "It's a complete relaxer but you can still function and do other things. It's not like when you're drunk and totally out of it."

Some students said they took prescription drugs socially because they are cheaper than alcohol. One out of four students interviewed said they had misused Ritalin, primarily to keep up with academic demands, Quintero said.