Action 3 News - Omaha, Nebraska News, Weather, and Sports | School "Daze": Beware of Teen Drug Trend
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Omaha, NE - Got an ache?
Pop a pill.
Wanna get high?
Pop another pill.
It's the latest trend and more kids are doing it.
Action 3 News reporter Kathy Sarantos Niver talked with a family that learned firsthand the horror of this latest fad.
Sharon Boll remembers getting the call eight months ago today, on a Saturday night at 5 o'clock: "At first you can't breathe because you're thinking, 'Oh God, let him survive!'"
Their 18-year-old son Mitch had stopped breathing and had been rushed by squad to the emergency room.
He'd been experimenting with prescription pills that didn't belong to him.
Mitch's dad, George Boll, tells Kathy: "We were praying for a miracle."
Mitch lived for nine days in the hospital.
But as she looked at him, his mom knew he wasn't coming back to them: "My Mitch wasn't there anymore."
Her Mitch was a funloving kid who had just graduated, worked and saved his money, and was always surrounded by friends.
His parents had no idea he'd been trying xanax, adderall and oxycontin.
Sharon says: "I would have said, 'Mitch, what are you thinking? It's too dangerous.' But I never had that chance."
Douglas County attorney Don Kleine is aware of the dangerous trend: "I see this as being the up and coming area in drug abuse."
Nearly one in ten twelfth graders in a recent survey admitted to using drugs like vicodin or oxycontin in the past year without a doctor's okay.
In recent months kids have been arrested at UNO, Millard North, Westside, Thomas Jefferson, Missouri Valley, Bellevue East and Mercy.
Kleine says: "We see it on an almost daily basis."
Pharmacists are also aware of the experimentation. Kohll's pharmacist Andrea Bourgoin tells Kathy: "You used to see it just high school, college age, but it seems like it's even dropping into the middle school age right now."
One way to get it...kids just go on the Internet.
They type in "buy adderall" on Google and thousands of places pop up where they can buy the drug.
If they switch over to YouTube they can watch other kids popping pills for fun.
Pharmacists consider the drugs dangerous and addictive enough that they keep them locked up.
But kids say prescription drugs are easier to get than illegal drugs.
In one survey, 52% said they're "available everywhere."
62% said they're easy to get from their parents' medicine chest. According to Bourgoin: "The parents never realize it's not there."
George and Sharon don't know where Mitch got his pills...they just know he wasn't alone in his experimentation.
Sharon says: "Kids think they're indestructible at that age. Just indestructible. 'Let's party. Do what everybody else is doing.'"
Mitch's dad George says: "My biggest regret right there is that I didn't hug him when we said goodbye (the night before). You never realize it'll be your last chance."
Sharon adds wistfully: "I just wish pharmaceutical companies would come up with a pill to fix a broken heart."
Here's how to take action against this latest drug trend:
*Throw away any prescriptions you don't finish.
*If you have pill bottles around, count the pills so you know exactly how many you have.
*Remind your child their meds are just for them--and could hurt others.
*And have a family sit-down to discuss pill abuse. One study found that the number of parents who had discussions with their kids about alcohol and other drugs fell dramatically between 2005 and 2006.
