Abusing drugs not bought on the street

When parents find out that their child has a drug problem, one of the first things they ask is, where did you get these drugs?

Often the answer is, from a dealer.

But sometimes the drugs aren't bought on the street, because they are in the home.

Behind the door of the medicine cabinet.

And prescription drugs can be every bit as dangerous and deadly as any drug bought on the street.

No one knows this more than the family and friends of two young men from Carpentersville who died Sunday from an apparent overdose of the prescription painkiller oxycodone, according to police.

Deaths linked to prescription drugs have "quadrupled or more" in the Chicago area over the past 10 years, according to Dr. Greg Teas. He is the medical director of the chemical dependency program at Alexian Brothers Behavioral Health Hospital in Hoffman Estates.

The Daily Herald in its own reporting has tracked an increase in abuse of prescription drugs in the suburbs. In 2005, we found that the number of adults seeking help for prescription drug addiction doubled at area hospitals. In a two-part series last year, we wrote of teens gathering for "pharming parties," at which they put a mixture of prescription pills into a bowl and ingest whatever they pull out.

The evidence is stacked against any dangerously mistaken notion that it's safe to experiment with drugs that are legally prescribed by a doctor.

Public awareness campaigns that stress the danger associated with abuse of prescription drugs have to be intensified. Similar crusades and community forums seemed to have been effective in helping contain an alarming increase in the abuse of ecstasy and heroin documented by the Daily Herald in its 2001 series, "The Hidden Scourge: How Heroin and Club Drugs Have Taken Root in the Suburbs." Ecstasy use among those age 12 to 17 had declined 41 percent by 2003, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

But where the anti-drug abuse message must start -- and where it must be the strongest -- is in the home. Parents that have every reason to trust their children will not experiment with drugs still cannot afford to be indifferent to the possibility. Not when drugs of all kinds are out there, and when the seemingly most stable of youngsters are prone to crack under pressure from peers to use them.

Parents would do well to keep a close watch on whatever prescription drugs they have in the house for themselves and be alert to telltale signs of abuse of such. And get their children into treatment, if necessary.

But teens also have good radar for phoniness. If parents are not obeying the rules in their own prescription drug use -- if they are among those adults who need to check themselves into hospitals for addiction to painkillers -- how can they possibly expect their children to find credibility in stern lectures about drug abuse?