Prescription meds replacing coke and heroin as drugs of choice on college campuses

USA Today reports on prescription drug use among young people. It seems few take the drugs for the high. Mostly they take pain medication to relieve stress and in the case of Ritalin, to improve their concentration. It's interesting that universities with the highest academic standards have the highest rates of unprescribed use.

I'm actually not surprised to learn that greater numbers of college students are using Ritalin (without a prescription) to enhance academic performance, but only because I know a Smith student that did a paper on it. I was certainly surprised when she initially clued me in to the practice. I've always thought of it as a pretty evil and way over-prescribed drug. And the results of this survey were a real eye-opener.

Meanwhile, Boyd surveyed 1,017 middle and high school students in a Detroit-area public school district. Almost half the children had legitimate prescriptions for Ritalin and other medications. Ritalin is a stimulant used to treat attention deficit disorder.

Among the students surveyed by Boyd's group, one in four with legitimate prescriptions said other kids had asked them for pills. One in five said they had sold or traded away at least one pill. Most of the students who reported using such drugs without a prescription — 79% — said they had done so to relieve pain rather than to get high, Boyd says. About 11% said they took the drugs to get high.

Boyd says the survey indicates that "when we talk about this big boom in prescription-drug abuse, we have to talk about two different groups who are using the drugs for two different reasons."

Half a school system is prescribed drugs legally? And I blogged a few weeks back on children in kindergarten being disagnosed as bi-polar and being prescribed adult strength anti-psychotic meds. It's beyond me how they sell the war on some drugs as a way to protect our children when they're already being drugged out of reality on legally prescribed (and often school mandated) pharmaceutical poisons. It makes a mockery of the ONDCP's contention that they are reducing drug use among that age group.