Stimulants and prescription abuse
Prescription drug abuse has been on the rise nearly every year for the past decade, with 15 percent of all high school seniors reporting nonmedical use of sedatives, especially the prescription drugs Valium, Ativan, Klonopin, and Xanax. Researchers at Rockefeller University found that adolescents exposed to OxyContin (the narcotic oxyco-done) can suffer lifelong damage to their brains because of permanent changes in the reward system.
As the adolescent brain prunes itself, OxyContin appears to trick it into keeping more dopamine receptors than it needs. Painkillers like OxyContin activate the brain’s opioid receptors and release more dopamine in the brain’s reward center due to use of hard-core drugs.
The administrator of that rehab facility for teenagers in Connecticut I mentioned earlier in this chapter said he himself became an alcoholic at the age of just thirteen. Now middle aged, he says he has seen many young kids end up on hard-core drugs after taking painkillers for a sports injury. As a society, we’re too soft on pain, he told me. Parents don’t want to see their kids hurting, so they make sure their son or daughter has a prescription for painkillers.
So a kid might take Percocet, for instance, and continue taking it even when there is no more pain involved because there’s a bit of a physical addiction. Eventually the Percocet runs out, he explained, but you can get oxycodone on the street. Oxy, of course, is expensive, so when the person is offered much cheaper heroin, it’s hard to resist. But since this person doesn’t think of himself as an addict and would never shoot up, he snorts the heroin, which is ten times stronger and ten times cheaper than oxycodone.
Before you know it, a kid with a sports injury is hooked on smack-and lost-and when he finally realizes there’s an even cheaper high in shooting up heroin, he’s hit rock bottom. It’s pretty grisly, but this rehab administrator says he’s seen it happen over and over again. How do you talk to teens about this kind of danger? I asked. He said they have to be ready to hear it, but the more you can get them to identify with other people it’s happened to, the more you can embed the stories of addiction into situations they can relate to, and then the easier it is to get the message across.
Adolescent addiction is particularly pernicious because over along period of usage, the brain responds to the hyperactivity of dopamine by reducing dopamine receptors, and a loss of receptors means less stimulation.
The result is called tolerance. The addict must take increasingly larger doses of the hard-core drugs to obtain the same high he or she experienced the first time around. And with the reward pathways so hypersensitized to being stimulated, withdrawal also comes quickly and is more pronounced than in adults, leaving the teenage drug abuser susceptible to anxiety, irritability, and depression and there- fore even more determined to get high again.
The chilling realization about hard-core drugs use and adolescence is this: The same brain processes that make negotiating the teen years so difficult make substance abuse more likely. An immature prefrontal Cortex means less control over impulsive behavior, less understanding of the consequences, and fewer tools to stop the behavior. And an immature nucleus accumbens is also more active than an adult’s, and this means teens will almost automatically seek out high-risk, high- reward activities that take little effort and offer maximum bang for the buck.
Signs of hard core drugs abuse
The immediate dangers of taking hard core drugs, the life-and-death cospecies, are now well known. Middle school student who died after swallowing a single tablet of Ecstasy, was laid to rest, four adolescents and a twenty-year-old had to face the consequences of giving her the drug and not getting her the medical assistance she needed in a timely fashion.
Two eighth-grade girls pleaded guilty to furnishing a minor with a controlled substance and cruelty to a child that was likely to result in harm or death. They were forced to cooperate with the district attorney’s office during the prosecution of the three other defendants and attend an eight-month drug rehabilitation program for adolescent girls. The twenty-year-old man, Anthony Rivera, received a five-year prison sentence for providing the Ecstasy pills by selling them to seventeen-year-old Calin Fintzi, who in turn sold them to Irma’s two eighth-grade friends.
Rivera also provided the marijuana he thought would help case Irma’s painful reaction to the Ecstasy pill. And the fifth person, eighteen- year-old Angelique Malabey? She served six months in jail for helping Rivera hide the hard-core drugs after Irma’s death. Please understand that there is biology making substances of abuse even more irresistible to the teenager than to an adult. We need to approach the substance-abusing teenager aggressively, and possibly with more empathy than we do an addicted adult. A teen still has the capacity to change, to recover, but only with very aggressive intervention. Even a “good” kid can get mixed up with the “wrong” kids and fall into the trap of substance abuse very easily.
Hence, as parents and teachers, and even teen peers, we need to keep a very watchful eye on signs of drug abuse. Withdrawal, dramatic changes in appetite and sleeping habits, excess irritability, or lack of personal hygiene, among other things, should raise concern. Talk to other adults around the teen and check if they have observed the same thing. I hate to say it. but have a low threshold for suspicion. You will be doing your child a favor. If you have to play detective in a child’s room when he or she leaves for school, do it… for your child.
If there is any evidence, you must call your pediatrician and describe what you are seeing. Addiction is a medical issue, not just “delinquent behavior”- addiction is a disease, and it can be treated. There are dozens of websites that will lead you and your teen to free care, and a good place to start if you have no other options would be the National Institute on Drug Abuse (www.drugabuse.gov). Most communities and towns have re-sources you can access. If you think there is something going on, you must make contact-you could be saving your child’s life down the road.
