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The gateway to addiction By Brittany Lyte Updated: 12/17/2009 02:23:48 PM EST
Ginger Katz launched the Courage to Speak Foundation, a non-profit agency that aims to educate parents and teens about substance abuse, in 1996 after her 20-year-old son died of a heroin overdose in his bedroom of the family's Norwalk home. Katz's son, Ian, began using marijuana experimentally in 10th grade. By his freshman year of college, he had developed a deadly addiction to heroin. Marijuana and alcohol, Katz said, are the two most common drugs used by teens. They are also the most apt to lead to experimentation with other "harder" drugs, like heroin. According to Katz, it takes a 30-year-old 10 years to reach the chronic stages of alcoholism. With the same amount of alcohol, she said, it takes a teen 15 and younger fewer than 15 months to reach the chronic stages of alcoholism. "Kids' bodies are still growing," Katz said. "Their brains do not develop until they are 24 years old, so these drugs, including alcohol, are very dangerous for a teenager's growing body. They get quickly addicted to them much faster than an adult because their body is still growing. Don't underestimate it. If you give alcohol to a baby, that could be lethal. If you give it to a 13-year-old "¦ it's really not good." The reality is that drugs are purer, stronger and more available than ever, and dealers are marketing teens, Katz said. Moira Rizzo, a licensed marriage and family therapist, said that the average age at which a Fairfield County youth first consumes alcohol is 11.7 years old, which is younger than the national average. Nationally, the peak years of alcohol initiation are in seventh and eighth grade, when students are between 12 and 14 years old, according to the 2007 Surgeon General's Call to Action To Prevent and Reduce Underage Drinking. A December 2008 survey, compiled by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, found that 38.9 percent of American eighth graders -- who are typically between 13 and 14 years old -- have tried alcohol at least once. Additionally, 32.1 percent reported drinking in the last year, and 15.9 percent said they had used alcohol in the month leading up to the survey. The number is significantly higher for 11th and 12th grade students -- 28.8 and 43.1 percent (respectively) of whom had consumed alcohol in the 30 days leading up to the survey. According to the 2007 Connecticut School Health Survey, 45,000 -- or about 26.2 percent -- of Connecticut high school students have participated in binge drinking -- defined as consuming five or more drinks in a row within a couple hours -- at least once in the 30 days leading up to the survey. New Canaan native Chappy Leboond, 25, said he struggled with alcohol and drug addiction for nearly 12 years, starting at age 11. Leboond now volunteers for Alcoholics Anonymous and has been sober for 22 months. "There's an attitude of entitlement and an attitude of invincibility [among teens]," he said. "Most of us drink because we don't fit in." Leboond views alcohol as more of a gateway drug than marijuana, the textbook example of a gateway drug. The uninhibited, "out-of-control" feeling that alcohol stirs in a young drinker, he said, makes the risks of additional, simultaneous drug use seem minimal. "Ecstasy was huge when I was in high school," said Leboond, a 2002 graduate of New Canaan High School. "We would do that every weekend and mix it with pain killers. We couldn't get our hands on a lot of alcohol, so we would drink a beer and mix it with Percocet." Leboond said he used to scam doctors to bulk his prescription pill collection. "The only thing I talked to my doctor for was to get Adderall and Xanax," he said. "It wasn't sitting on the couch, talking about my problems. I was sitting on the couch, pushing prescriptions." Teen prescription pill abuse is on the rise, according to Silver Hill Hospital child and adolescent psychiatrist Dr. Sandra Gomez. Gomez, who is a Silver Hill medical staffer and is an assistant professor of psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine, said that OxyContin is the most widely abused pill-form stimulant in the state, followed by Adderall and Percocet. "They are readily available in the cabinets of many houses," she said. "Everybody knows somebody in school who has been prescribed this medication, so it's very easy for adolescents to get them. They pass them along in high school and middle school to friends to try and they snort it." Adderall, Gomez said, improves the over-all function of adolescents, including their ability to perform in academics, sports, extra-curricular activities and social situations. "This is a very competitive academic environment," she said. [These students] come from accomplished families that expect that their kids will go to a good college, and it's a lot of pressure for them." Stimulants like Adderall result in increased energy and alertness and decreased appetite. Parents who think their child may be using a stimulant should also look for signs of withdrawal, as well as irritability, mood swings, low energy or increased appetite when the drug is wearing off, Gomez said. Many adolescents who abuse stimulants like Adderall are not likely to discontinue use until they reach a certain level of accomplishment that satisfies them, Gomez said. "The reality of it is that most of them are not going to stop because they are driven to perform at a certain level. What it comes down to is, do they want to achieve an 'A' while taking medication or do they want to achieve an 'A' while studying harder," Gomez said, adding, "I think it would require a change in values so that the kids [realize] that in the long run, taking a pill to perform is sort of like fake." According to Katz, pill-form stimulants are a gateway drug to heroin because both of them are narcotics. Like prescription pills, Katz said, heroin can be snorted. Drug dealers, she said, know that teens won't want to inject heroin into their bloodstreams with a needle, so they market youths with heroin forms that can be snorted or smoked. Heroin and other drugs are heavily trafficked into Fairfield County from Interstate 95 and Boston, Katz said. "It's easier [for teens] to get a bag of dope or a bag of heroin or an eighth of weed -- or whatever your flavor is -- than it is to get a six pack of beer," Leboond said. "That's how this starts." In addition to prescription pill abuse, Gomez said, there has been a recent resurgence in ecstasy use by Connecticut teens. Occasionally, she said, cocaine and inhalant abuse surfaces. "Often what we find is kids have been using gateway drugs [like alcohol, marijuana and prescription pills] for years before they progress into using what we call more 'hardcore' drugs, and only then do the families find out," Gomez said. The NCPD is helping to plan a premiere New Canaan-based prescription pill drive in April. The NCPD hopes to open the drive to residents across Fairfield County. The aim of the drive, according to NCPD Youth Division Sgt. Carol Ogrinc, is to curb prescription pill abuse among teens by offering parents a way to cleanse all unneeded pills from their medicine cabinet collections. Excess pills create a greater risk of abuse in a household, Ogrinc said. The drive will help residents avoid disposal methods like toilet flushing, which contaminates the water table and creates a public health hazard, she said. |
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