This story from February 28, 2011 started out to be heart-breaking, and then got even worse. Several stories were told about kids who started taking pain medications in order to get high when they were as young as sixteen. A boy named Bobby died just a couple of years after getting addicted to them. His mother is crushed. A Health Department official admitted that deaths by prescription drug overdose have gone down in the past few years, which is a good thing. But there are still a couple hundred families who get devastated every year when they lose a loved one. It’s more prevalent among those who are over 20 years old, actually. But that doesn’t mean that there are not exceptions.
10% of high school students in Utah have admitted to taking some prescriptions that were not theirs.
But worse of all was this story: a 13 year old middle school student named Connor died from an overdose of Oxycontin. His mother said that other students have confided to her that this is happening quite a lot. The kids have pill parties and don’t even know what they are taking. They just experiment.
Now if you have ever hung out with or had any middle school aged kids, you know what they are like. You might even remember what you were like. Awkward. Concerned about being popular, being liked. Not sure what’s right and wrong. Pressured by others to try things and teased if they remain concerned that their parents will object. Girls go to a slumber party and get introduced to smoking and sneaking off with guys and experimenting with kissing and sex. Kids at ages 12-14 do not possess all of the abilities to think through situations logically and realize consequences. They often think only about what is going on in the particular moment, and in that moment the idea of doing something daring and new is pretty tempting – especially if the other kids tell them that it didn’t hurt them when they tried it. To a 13 year old, that’s tantamount to reading it in the American Medical Association Journal.
There’s even a feeling that as long as mom and dad don’t know about it – as long as they don’t get caught – nothing bad is going to happen to them.
Connor’s mom has written to the students in her son’s school and has established a blog in the hopes that she can make more people aware of what’s going on with these young kids. They are finding the drugs in their homes and their relatives’ homes.
We can all do something about that.
