Prescription pain killer abuse has become such a problem that some are now calling our young adults “Generation Rx.”
It’s gotten so bad that state and federal law enforcement leaders joined together in hosting a prescription drug summit in Portland this week, the first of its kind in the nation.
One focus of the problem – teens who get hooked by stealing a pill or two from their parent’s medicine cabinet, then end up addicted to heroin, or worse.
A young Portland-area man agreed to tell us his story if we hid his identity. The man, who we’ll call “Willie,” began the road to addiction in high school.
The straight-A, student-athlete snuck a few pain killers from his dad. Soon, his cravings took off.
“I started searching for pills on the street, I’d find Percocet or morphine sulfate,” Willie told us, “because my addiction got a lot worse after I went to college.”
By his junior year in college, Willie was taking 200 dollars a day from his financial aid just to satisfy his habit.
Then, his addiction stepped up.
“I came in contact with someone using heroin and said it’s a lot cheaper and so I said I’m broke and I don't want to get sick,” Willie said, concerned about withdrawal. He said heroin gave him “one of the greatest feelings I ever experienced.”
He got to the point where he almost killed his girlfriend with an overdose.
“I gave her half as much as I did, and she overdosed, stopped breathing, started turning purple, I gave her CPR, called the ambulance,” he said.
Willie is now four months into his recovery and plans to transfer to a new college and complete his bachelor degree.
But his story of addiction is far from unique. Teenage overdoses are happening more and more. Just last week at a Hillsboro school, four middle school kids overdosed on oxycontin.
Those teens survived. But earlier this month in Medford, a 13-year old died of an overdose of a prescription narcotic while at a friend's house.
The scope of the problem is no surprise to Dr. Andy Mendenhall of Healthworks NW. He’s helping Willie through his recovery.
“It's been frightening to see the number of people who have started to experiment in adolescence,” Dr. Mendenhall said. He told Newschannel 8 that more U.S. teenagers now experiment with prescription painkillers than with marijuana.
Dr. Mendenhall says our medical system is partly responsible for what he calls generation Rx. A recent medical study exposed how doctors overprescribe painkillers.
“5,000 patients in an academic medical center came in and were discharged on the same day and 87 percent walked out with prescription opiates,” Dr. Mendenhall said.
All those opiates, made from the same plant as heroin, wind up in our medicine cabinets, creating a huge supply -and a huge risk - for kids like Willie.
