Another Drug To Worry About For Waterford Teens

Well, there is a new drug epidemic facing this country, and even little ol’ Waterford. But the town’s is fighting back.

In 2009, 257 million prescriptions for opiate-based painkillers were prescribed to Americans, compared to 174 million such prescriptions in 2000 (there are only 311 million people in the United States). Addiction is rampant among adults, and now that same problem is spreading to children.

“It is increasing nationally,” Youth Services Director Dani Gorman said. “It is trending upwards.”

The bureau has not measured how many Waterford teenagers abuse prescription drugs (they will start this school year), but one in five United States teenagers admit using prescription painkillers to get high, Waterford Youth Services Grant Coordinator Christine Poscich said. In response, the bureau is creating an action plan to stop the problem, she said.

A few months ago, the youth service bureau installed a , which has been , Poscich said. The next goal is to raise awareness of the issue and begin to get parents to protect against their children getting prescription drugs, she said.

The awareness piece was partially completed by putting up a giant, anti-prescription drug abuse billboard at the intersection of Route 85 and Cross Road. There will be more done in schools to attack the problem as well, Gorman said.

About Drug Use

Unlike other drugs like marijuana and cocaine, prescription drugs are in most people’s homes, Gorman said. Many teenagers get the drugs by stealing it from their parents or from someone else, either to take or to sell, she said.

The best way to control that is to lock up the drugs, and then turn them into the repository at the police department once one is done with them, Gorman said. She also cautioned that teenagers might get them from seniors they know or from other houses, so to ensure that other people are keeping their prescriptions secure as well, she said.

If some pills are missing, try to figure out what happened, Gorman said. If instincts are telling a parent it might be their child or another child, talk with those people, she said.

“I always tell parents to trust their gut,” Gorman said. “(Missing pills) shouldn’t be ignored.”

Poscich and Gorman said research shows that if teenagers are going to experiment with drugs, they generally begin in the summer between eighth and ninth grade. The youth service bureau begins working with children in seventh grade and cranks it up in eighth and ninth, to try to avoid drug abuse from taking place.

“We , not intervention,” Gorman said.

Macro Issues

As mentioned, painkillers like oxycodone are being prescribed at record amounts. That has other issues as well, including an explosion of heroin addiction.

In a presentation to Waterford’s Emmett Riley, the director of development for the Southeastern Council of Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, Inc, told the board that he is seeing more and more people addicted to heroin.

The reason? Prescription painkillers.

Most prescription painkillers are opiate-based. Once the prescription runs out, there is still an addiction for an opiate, which is filled with heroin, Riley said.

“It has no economic barriers,” Riley said. “It’s frightening.”

The cost of heroin has declined sharply as well, with CNN reporting that now a one-dose bag of heroin is cheaper than a six-pack of beer. That is largely because of an increased supply of the drug.

The world’s largest producer of heroin is Afghanistan. In 2000, many Afghan farmers stopped selling heroin after Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar declared it “un-Islamic,” according to the New York Times. That resulted in the supply of herion to nearly vanish, and the cost to skyrocket, according to the Times.

However since the United States’ invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Afghans again started growing heroin, thereby dramatically increasing the supply. Additionally, United States' agents made deals with Afghan drug lords to fight the Taliban, while turning a blind eye to increased heroin production, according to the Times.

The result was a huge increase in heroin production, meaning a huge increase in supply and thereby a huge decrease in price. The United States has since incentivized Afghans to stop growing heroin, but production remains high, according to the New York Times.