Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Study: Legal drugs are what's ensnaring teens

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published May 16, 2006

NEW YORK - Teen smoking and drinking continued to drop, but teenage abuse of prescription drugs has become "an entrenched behavior" that many parents fail to recognize, a survey released today showed.

For a third straight year, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America study showed that about one in five teens have tried prescription drug painkillers to get high - about 4.5-million teens.

Forty percent of teens said prescription medicines were "much safer" than illegal drugs. The study further found that 29 percent of teens think prescription pain relievers are nonaddictive.

Although this was the group's 18th annual survey, Partnership has compiled figures on the abuse of legal drugs for only a few years. In 2003, the study found 20 percent of teens had tried the prescription drugs Vicodin, OxyContin and Tylox. Over the next two years, the numbers remained fairly consistent.

Partnership president Steve Pasierb warned parents that the source of drugs is now the family medicine cabinet more than any dealer. The study found that 62 percent of teens said prescription pain relievers are easy to find at home.

Parents "don't have a frame of reference in a lot of cases," Pasierb said. "This kind of behavior (prescription drug abuse) didn't exist when they were teens."

The Partnership survey put teen smoking at 22 percent, down from 23 percent last year and 42 percent in 1998. The number of teens drinking in the past 30 days was down from 33 percent last year to 31 percent; in 1998, the figure was 42 percent.

The 2005 Partnership Attitude Tracking Study surveyed more than 7,300 teens in grades 7 through 12. Its margin of error was 1.5 percentage points.

[Last modified May 16, 2006, 07:23:18]