Dec 21, 2006, 20:58 GMT
Washington - Abuse of painkillers and cough syrups is rising among younger US high-school students even as fewer teens use methamphetamine, cigarettes and alcohol, officials said Thursday.
Nearly 10 per cent of US high-school seniors - students aged 17 or 18 - report having used the analgesic Vicodin to get high, and one in 20 used the painkiller OxyContin, said John Walters, head of the US government's Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Despite a trend among high-school seniors toward less overall drug use, an annual survey released Thursday found that their use of the party drug ecstasy was up 1.1 per cent in 2006.
Abuse of OxyContin was at its highest yet among students aged 13 to 16. And in the first national US survey of teens' abuse of cold and cough medicine dextromethorphan (DXM), 4 per cent of 13- to 14-year-olds and nearly 7 per cent of students in their last year of high school said they got high that way in the last year.
Teens often simply raid medicine cabinets at home to get the drugs, possibly thinking that the drugs are safer because they are legitimate medicines in normal doses, experts said.
'Clearly the prescription drugs have become a more important part of the problem,' said the University of Michigan's Lloyd Johnston, the report's lead author.
Using high amounts of prescription cough medicine or painkillers can have an opiate-like effect and can lead to brain damage or death, experts said.
In keeping with recent trends, the study found marijuana use among US teens fell significantly from 2005 to 2006. Compared to 2001, the number who had used the drug in the past month fell by nearly 25 per cent, the government-sponsored study found.
Cigarette smoking was at an all-time low for the three US grades surveyed - eighth, 10th and the senior grade, 12th - and alcohol use continued to decrease. Meth use by young people in the US was down by more than 40 percent since 2001.
But the number who abused OxyContin in the past year almost doubled among eighth graders since 2002, though use among 12th- graders dipped in 2006, the study said.
At a Washington news conference, Walters urged every adult to 'go to your medicine cabinet, take unused or those prescription drugs you are finished using with and throw them away.'
The survey polled about 48,500 students in 410 US secondary schools, public and private.
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