Prescription drug abuse more than kids getting high: group

BOSTON (Reuters) - As state, federal and local authorities across the United States struggle to contain a rising tide of prescription-drug abuse, Reuters Boston Bureau Chief Jason Szep spoke with Stephen Pasierb, president and chief executive of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, a non-profit advocacy group.

What follows are excerpts from the interview.

REUTERS: What prescription drugs are abused the most and how would you characterize the scale of the problem?

PASIERB: On the prescription side, there's a number of abused products or misused products, from the Attention Deficit things like Ritalin and Adderall on and on and on. But probably the most pernicious and most dangerous of all those are the prescription pain relievers. These are led by OxyContin and then the Percodan, Percocet and then followed up by Vicodin and all the hydrocodone generics.

A lot is said in this field about how this is a behavior simply of kids going out to get high. And we've always advanced the thesis that it's not that simple. And in fact we just completed some research about a month and a half ago which we did some Capital Hill briefings on, which really goes into this mindset that teenagers in particular have, where it's a much more purposeful behavior. They're quite sophisticated in their understanding of what these different drugs are. And while there is indeed a segment who simply use these as a new way to go out and get wrecked, there's an equal segment who are using them exactly for their intended purposes, but outside of a doctor's recommendation or prescription.

So, if you will, that college student who will tell you I am not a drug abuser, I am not a bad person. But if I can get Ritalin and Adderall to help me study, I'm going to do it. Because I have used it, and I get better grades on it'. So, to him or her, their experience is both very tactical and positive. So in the idea of trying to go tell them Well, that's bad', the results that this child has seen are exactly right and exactly in line so that they only see benefit.

And then you've got this other segment who are truly self medicating. They're either in pain, or they're depressed, or there's something going on in their life. And their misuse/abuse of prescription drugs has helped them manage their lives better. So, what is frequently thrown out there, particularly on the government side as prescription drug abuse, the new threat, is much more finesse than simply saying that. And we kind of layer on top of that, some additional attitudinal research we've done where if you look at both teenagers and young adults, and their parents, what you find is this kind of veil of safety and appropriateness around all of these products. You see the teenager saying it's a new and much safer way to get high, saying I wouldn't do illegal street drugs. You have no idea where those come from. But, heck, these are made in a sterile lab and they're FDA approved'. They see less risk in it.

We've also seen a scary number of websites where teenagers are saying that prescription pain relievers were not addictive. They're not like heroin'. Well, OxyContin is pharmaceutical heroin, there's really no difference between the two.

And so what you have for really the first time on the drug landscape in America is a kind of this shift from the host of agricultural products, what we call farming with a "f", marijuana, poppies, cocoa, to pharming with a "ph", this host of pharmaceutical products, from a wide range, which consumers are abusing and really see no downside, no stigma, I'm not a bad person, I'm not taking my health at risk'. None of the normal triggers that would play around substance abuse