What I learned at a rehab facility -- Pharm Kids

I recently went to a rehab facility to lend support to a friend who is getting their alcohol intake under control. Before you can visit with anyone there, you must attend about 6 hours of lecture / meeting. There were about 30 of us in the session -- friends, spouses, and lots of parents. In fact parents of 18 to 25 year-olds were the majority. The heartbreak in that room was overwhelming.

I did my share of drinking and drugging but I was clueless about what goes on among high school kids these days. My family moved to southern California in the late 1970s. Smoking pot was a given. And I had a few classmates in high school who went for the more exotic stuff -- PCP, opium, cocaine...

30 years later apparently the big thing is to raid your grandparents medicine cabinet. In the Philadelphia area kids are having "pharm parties" -- throw your pills in a bowl with the others. Grab out a few and take them. Just take whatever (?) I don't get it. Why would anyone want to scarf down a handful of mood flatteners (prozac) high blood pressure meds and ritalin? just at random too.

Parents in that room told me how their kids went from Oxycontin to heroin because the heroin was cheaper. Percaset, codeine, Tylenol 3s and 4s, Zoloft, etc. etc.

So take-away number 1 was get rid of those left over meds from when you had serious pain. Or if you have to have those around invest in a med cabinet that locks.

#2 marijuana is no longer thought of as an addictive drug. Granted it never was one but the hype has died and reputable rehab facilities don't claim to treat it as an addiction. Same for LSD.

#3 I'm getting old but I am thankful that I didn't go to school with kids who were hooked on grandma's boring pills. And btw what happens to grandma after junior swipes her stash?

pharm parties I think about Karen Ann Quinlan. People are nuts.

Friends had me talk to their kids about drugs, me being an RN with a typically colorful substance abuse history. I always told them the way to be safe is to be clean living, one drug at a time. If that drug was alcohol, not to take any kind of pill with it because that's the easiest way to end up dead or on a ventilator in a nursing home.

Oddly enough, the kids listened to me. I don't think any of them were into drugs, although many of them did drink ahead of legal schedule.

I remember seconals.

and the kids who used them weren't exactly the sharpest sticks in the box

There's no "good" drugs in our medicine chest. The best thing a kid would get at a party featuring my medicine chest would a bit of allergy relief and maybe a nice crap. Oh, and that aspirin might take the edge off a headache.

Funny how, when I was young and foolish, the geezer generation used to say "I wouldn't want to be young again!" Of course, I was so certain, in my smug and invincible youth, that they were indulging in a bit of sour grapes. Now that I'm moving up the actuarial tables, I see their point. It's just no damn fun to be a kid in America these days.

I just got off of Oxycotin, which was prescribed for the pain for my lost leg, and it was two days of pure HELL! I probably could have handled the pain without such a bad drug..for me anyway.

I remember this one young man in my senior year of HS, and he was hooked on huffing jet fuel? How he got it or if it was even true is beyond me, but he wound up in a mental facility at a young age, completely out of his mind. I even remember being blown away from the fumes coming from inside his car.

And to think of a parent getting a call because their child has really low BP? Terrible~!

It's Stewart Lee talking about this (horrible, horrible) show called "Skins".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWcpkNbIJZg

a shoulder injury followed by a broken foot the following year. Both episodes required pain relief beyond what the doctor ordered. No, I didn't get addicted, either, although I could see how a person would become dependent on them.

My brother has alot of health problems, including Type II diabetes that became type I. He's getting an insulin pump soon. He did alot of chemistry lab drugs. I can't help but think they have contributed to his health problems and depression.

I've heard of the pharm parties. Saw a re-creation clip of one on one of the CSI shows. This is just so stupid.

Or did they leave out the fact that we have raised an entire generation of (primarily male) children who are on one prescription mood altering drug or another? Ritalin, for example, is not being swiped from their parents medication, it is being distributed from supplies from kids put on Ritalin by their doctor.

Did they inform you that one of the reasons kids turn to pills rather than the far more benign pleasures of pot is that the schools and that 90's and 00's phenomena, the school cop, can suppress pot use effectively at school, but have a much tougher time sniffing out pill poppers? Want to get busted by the school cop? Smoke a joint. Want to be high in school? Pop a pill.

One of the rules of prohibition is that it pushes people away from soft drugs and toward hard drugs.

their own experiences. More many it seemed that being able to talk to somone in that room was huge load off of them. They are embarrassed and secretive about what their kids are going through.

I remember during college I was working for a large company's HR dept and this older guy tested positive for opiates (like codeine) and they let it go even though he did not declare it on his list of "what's in my bloodstream". Meanwhile an exec who was trying to get his kid on the payroll got the news that junior would not be joining the firm because there was THC in his urine.

And there is the whole semantic thing -- "drugs" versus "medicine"

Late 60's, early 70's - exactly the same thing. They considered themselves lucky if they had a grandparent with a particularly painful form of cancer.

Problem being the shit is so over prescribed it's not funny. Just like all meds these days. It will keep being illegal until pharmacutical reps are prohibited from contacting doctors and even more prohibited from wining and dining them.

Thanks big Pharma!

I'll stick to the occasional spliff.

Teenage drug activity has always been "glamorized" in such a way to frighten people -- these are "wowser" stories. You take a real-but-banal problem, like drug abuse, and you sex it up to grab attention.

The pill party (or "pharm party") is a good example. Those parties have been used to scare parents since the 1950s, and yet they are almost impossible to substantiate. They were about as common as hippies spitting on soldiers returning from Vietnam. I remember seeing a movie about drugs in school when I was 12 (circa 1970), and it showed a pill party with a punch bowl filled to the brim with pills. It would take about 5,000 aspirin tablets to fill an average punch bowl.

The teen pill party story was doubtless taken from the "Bridgeport party" scandal of the late 50s. A group of couples in Bridgeport, Connecticut, would hold weekly parties where the wives would put their house keys into a bowl and each of the husbands would pull out one at random. Whoever's door it opened would be the gal the husband had sex with that night.

And I'm not sure whether THAT one was a real story, either.

Then we have Red Star Acid and LSD Babies, speed and angel dust thrill killings, pills that cause instant Parkinson's disease, etc., etc., ad nauseam. All of these stories are told ostensibly to "warn" people away from drugs, but they have the opposite effect.

Drug abuse is a real, actual problem. It ruins thousands of lives every day, and our country has tied itself in knots over it. But it isn't all that sexy. Not only that, but most kids have very little interest in drugs outside of social, not just peer, pressure (note that well!) which is stoked by drug hype.

Alcohol is a bigger problem -- and even more banal.

The truth, shorn of all hype and bullshit, is sufficient to keep most people away from drugs. That will leave the small number of people with hard-core physiological addiction problems, who should be treated medically; and disease certainly isn't sexy.

But stories of teen-age drug thrills at clandestine parties just keeps the glamor alive, while the reality always stays a lot more dull and sickening. Drug addiction is a gray and miserable world. Wild stories have no place in recovering people from that life, no matter how well-intended.

--d!

have serious problems due to their parents either having to work continuously to make ends meet, leaving no time for the kids, parents who have their own addiction and life problems, or parents who actively didn't give a shit. There were several kids who had lots of trouble with the last group, including one rich family who were waiting for their 17 year old to die from drug abuse so they could split his trust fund. Another went home for Christmas, then took a bus back to the rehab because it was better than being with his parents.
The first kid I mentioned told me that our rehab was "the best place" he had ever been.

I would never want to be a kid today - I don't envy any of them.

mark

so basically you to rehab, you have enough time to dtox and puke for three days then you get kicked out.