The New Hampshire

Issue date: 4/25/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Courtesy Photo

On Tuesday, October 21, 2003, Gabby Bradley was sitting in her Marblehead, Mass., home. Moments after thinking about how her 17-year-old son Robert was adapting to a new life away from Marblehead, a policeman knocked on her front door to tell her that there was an incident, and Robert was dead.

After waiting many agonizing, sleepless weeks to find out why her son died, Bradley finally got an answer from the medical examiner's office: he had died from an overdose of morphine.

Robert Bradley is just one of the several people whose life has ended due to the rise of opiates and prescription pain medication that have been wreaking havoc in American society.

According to a national survey done by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services and Administration, four million young adults between the ages of 18 to 25 used prescription painkillers like OxyContin in 2006 for non-medicinal reasons. Of that four million, 1.7 percent met the criteria for dependence or abuse.

"The abuse of prescription medicine is tremendous," said Dr. Jefferson Prince, the director of child psychiatry for North Shore Medical Center in Salem, Mass. "People feel invincible and push their bodies without knowing any real consequences."

Adolescents between the ages of 15 and 19 tend to experiment with drugs like OxyContin, Oxycodone, Vicodin and ADD medication like Adderall. Prince said that people aged 20 to 25, on the other hand, tend to lean more toward opiates and benzodiazepines.

Opiates, or opioid analgesics, include hydrocodone, Oxycodone, methadone, Codeine, Dilaudid, morphine, Demerol, opium and any other drug with morphine-like effects. Benzodiazepines include colodopin and clonazepam.

With prescription pain medication and other prescription pills becoming more and more available for people of all ages, the question singed into the brains of specialists and parents is how these kids are obtaining such lethal drugs.

"Doctors prescribe the pill for a reason initially," said Edith Posselt, a staff psychologist and the coordinator of the testing program at UNH's Counseling Center. "Then some people stop taking a prescription before the dosage is up and they can begin selling it to other people, or even begin taking it themselves. They like the way it makes them feel, then step it up a notch to something else."

Once experimenting with one drug, it can be very difficult to stop because these painkillers are very addicting, Posselt said.

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