U.S grapples with rising prescription drug addiction

By Jason Szep

BOSTON (Reuters) - When Sarah Roisman was 11 years old, her doctors prescribed Klonopin, a muscle relaxant, for a psychiatric disorder that caused her to have seizures. She liked how the drug made her feel. Her seizures went away.

But that's where her trouble with addiction began.

By age 14, the teen from an upper middle-class Philadelphia suburb led a dangerous double life. Editor of her school paper, strong student and popular athlete, Roisman was also hooked on painkillers and other drugs in an addiction that illustrates the rapid expansion in prescription drug abuse in America.

"My friends and I would take a bunch of different pills and break them up and put them all together and call it confetti. It could be any combination of anything. We could learn from it, and continue to take it," said Roisman, who is now 17.

The issue of prescription drug abuse shot to prominence with January's death of 28-year-old Hollywood actor Heath Ledger after he took six different prescriptions. The death of Ledger, who plays the Joker in the new Batman film "The Dark Night," adds to a growing list of prescription drug overdoses that includes Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith in 2007.

Other deaths are less celebrated. In the 45-54 age group, overdose deaths fueled by prescription drugs now surpass motor vehicle deaths as the nation's No. 1 cause of accidental death, federal data show.

The federal data also show nearly 7 million Americans abused prescription drugs in 2007 -- more than cocaine, heroin, hallucinogens, Ecstasy and inhalants such as marijuana combined. The figure is up 80 percent since 2000.

Definitions of abuse vary but refer typically to nonmedical use of prescription drugs.

The number of Americans treated for abuse of painkillers surged 321 percent from 1995 to 2005, federal statistics show -- a trend some health experts link to another stunning figure: the 180 million prescriptions dispensed legally by U.S. pharmacies each year for pain medication.

In Florida, whose reputation for cocaine and other hard drugs was burnished in movies such as "Scarface" and "Miami Vice," the rate of deaths caused by prescription drugs was three times the rate of death caused by all illicit drugs combined, according to an analysis of 2007 autopsies by the Florida Medical Examiners Commission released in June.

'LOW SOCIAL DISAPPROVAL'

"What you have among over the counter and prescription drug use is a very low perception of risk," said Stephen Pasierb, president and chief executive of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, a nonprofit advocacy group.

"There's very low social disapproval. In fact, there are parents who almost relieved that their kid is using Vicodin and not smoking marijuana," he said.

Len Paulozzi, an epidemiologist with the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, testified recently in Congress that he believed physicians were improperly trained in the long-term dangers of therapy involving opioid painkillers, or drugs containing opium.

"There are guidelines out there, but we don't think that they're being routinely followed," he said.