Posted on June 16, 2009

More and more adolescents are turning up in emergency rooms having overdosed on a concoction of prescription medications after attending “pharm parties,” where juveniles bring a handful of random prescriptions, mix them up in a bowl, and wash down a handful with the beverage of their choice.

In eastern Idaho, more prescription drug overdoses in high school patients occurred in 2008-2009 than ever before, according to Dr. Randall Fowler of Portneuf Medical Center’s West Campus emergency room. He estimates that in recent months at least six people in their teens or early 20s have come into the emergency room with serious overdoses.

“It’s like Russian roulette because when you are pawing through a bowl full of different pills, capsules, and tablets, you’re not sure what medication you’re going to get,” Fowler said. “Whether it is something that you maybe have an allergy to, either a known allergy or an unknown allergy, you don’t know what the side effects are. You don’t know what the prescription was meant to treat, and especially if you bind it with alcohol or other drugs it can be lethal.”

Fowler also said that the emergency room is seeing a lot more intentional misuse of prescription mediction, including Vicodin, hydrocodone, and occasionally methadone and morphine.

Bannock Country Sherrif Lorin Nielsen is seeing the same problem in the county and at Marsh Valley High School, where he has a school resource officer stationed. “We have found that it doesn’t make a difference between rural or urban. It seems that these prescription painkillers have really popped up in the last two or three years to where we’re seeing more and more kids selling and using prescription drugs because they are easier to obtain,” Nielsen said.

Jim Harrell, director of student support services for School District 25, said that the district works closely with the local police department to monitor kids while they are in school, but that the best way to reduce prescription drug abuse is to educate parents, because they are often unknowingly supplying their kids with the drugs.

A number of kids also get involved because they are trying to make money. School Resource Officer Forest Peck said that kids will come to school with four or five pills they took from their parents with them intention of selling them for $20. Idaho law says that anyone 14 and older who is caught selling drugs at or near a school will be charged as an adult with a felony. “Before you know it, they are labeled as a drug dealer,” Peck said.