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Fox News — A warning from the Colorado Springs Police Department. Detectives with Metro Vice Narcotics said more and more teens are throwing "pharm parties," or get-togethers where young adults abuse prescription drugs.

Detectives said most teens get the medications from their parents and grandparents medicine cabinets. They said from there, the prescription drugs are then taken to parties and shared with the group.

Over the past few months, police said a handful of teenagers have overdosed on the drugs. They said some of the more popular pills include Xanax, Valium, Percoset, Oxycontin, Vikatin and Adderall to name a few.

It is called "trail mix," or a bowl filled with prescription drugs free for the taking. Detectives with the Colorado Springs Police Department said "trail mix" is the new party favor at many teen get-togethers.

"Then the kids just take turns taking a pill of their choice to see if it affects them and to see if they like it or not," an undercover officer with Metro VNI said.

Detectives with VNI said they have seen youth ages 12 to 22 abuse the drugs.

"I have had reports of pills being taken from grandma and grandpas when they go visit, aunts and uncles, friends going over to another kids house and taking from that medicine cabinet," a VNI Detective said.

The most popular pills detectives said are schedule II medications, or drugs that are highly addictive.

"Cocaine and meth are schedule II, Adderall, Oxycontin and Percosit are all schedule II as well, so they have the same abuse and addiction potential," a VNI Detective said.

Police said the internet has only made things worse by spreading information.

"They did an interview with a youth who overdosed, and the way he chose what medication to take was if it said ‘do not use with alcohol,’ that meant to him it was a great drug to use," a VNI Detective said.

They said many teens think prescription drugs are safe because they are prescribed by a doctor.

"Definitely, we have seen overdoses," a VNI Detective said.

To keep your kids safe, police said treat your pills like a gun, lock them up and put them away.

Detectives with VNI said prescription drug abuse is a nationwide problem that also affects millions of adults. If you or someone you know is abusing prescription pills log onto the website below for help.

The skyrocketing use and abuse of prescription narcotics in Las Vegas is accompanied by a similarly startling increase in the number of fatal overdoses, a Sun analysis has found.

Fatal overdoses involving prescription painkillers more than quadrupled in a decade and now exceed those involving illicit drugs, according to data compiled by the Clark County coroner’s office.

The trend reflects the extraordinarily high use of narcotic painkillers by Nevadans. The Sun reported Sunday that its analysis of Drug Enforcement Administration data shows that Nevadans per person use more hydrocodone — the potent ingredient in the drugs Vicodin, Lortab and Norco — than residents of any other state. Nevadans rank fourth nationally in per person consumption of methadone, morphine and oxycodone, the main ingredient in OxyContin.

The increased use and availability of the drugs are primary factors in the rise of addiction, illegal distribution and fatal overdoses, experts say.

In 1997, there were 57 fatal overdoses in Clark County in which prescription narcotics were a contributing factor, a rate of about five per 100,000 people. In 2007, 258 people died in Clark County from overdoses of prescription narcotics, a rate of 13 per 100,000 people.

In contrast, the number of deaths caused by illicit drugs has plateaued. Street drugs such as cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin were involved in a combined 197 fatal overdoses in 2007.

Deaths involving prescription narcotics exceeded or rivaled those caused by firearms (321) and motor vehicle accidents (234) in Clark County in 2007.

Clark County Coroner Mike Murphy called the prescription drug deaths a “dire situation.”

Doctors who specialize in pain management, and pharmaceutical companies that make the drugs, emphasize that many people are helped by prescription narcotics while acknowledging that a small percentage may become addicted.

Prescription drug overdoses draw national attention when the victims include such celebrities as Heath Ledger and Anna Nicole Smith, but aside from the sensational anecdotes, little is reported about the overall toll of overdoses.

Poisoning, usually caused by unintentional drug overdose, is the second leading cause of injury death in the United States, surpassing firearms in 2004, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

Prescription narcotics deaths accounted for 56 percent of poisoning deaths nationally in 2005, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and their absolute number increased by 84 percent from 1999 to 2005.

Some regional data compiled by medical examiners further illustrate the problem:

• In King County, Washington (Seattle), prescription opiates killed 148 people in 2006, a 572 percent increase since 1997.

• In Virginia, prescription narcotics took 399 lives in 2006, compared with 146 deaths from cocaine and amphetamines.

• In Oklahoma, of 603 drug-related deaths in 2006, more than half, 327, were attributed to hydrocodone, methadone or oxycodone.

• In Florida, people who died of drug overdoses in 2007 had prescription drugs in their systems more often than illicit drugs.

No prescribed narcotic is involved in more deaths among Nevadans than methadone. The long-acting painkiller was named in a third of the 1,771 prescription drug overdoses in Clark County from 1991 to 2007, according to the Clark County coroner’s office. The number of deaths involving methadone climbed from three in 1993 to 20 in 1998 and 105 in 2007. (Cocaine was a factor in 116 Clark County deaths in 2007.)

Methadone, widely used to wean addicts off other drugs, has grown in popularity as a painkiller in recent years. Several doctors said it’s preferred by insurance companies because it’s inexpensive — though insurers dispute this, saying there are many low-cost generic narcotics so there would be no reason to favor methadone.

But methadone is a challenging drug to prescribe because it stays in a person’s system for five to 11 days, even after its effects have worn off, said Las Vegas pain specialist Dr. Jim Marx. That means a patient could take multiple doses of methadone over time to keep pain in check, allowing potentially lethal amounts of the drug to build up in the body. In comparison, hydrocodone leaves the body within hours.

“It’s trickier to prescribe because of its persistence,” Marx said.

Methadone deaths have increased more than those involving any other narcotic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports.

Its data show Nevada had almost four methadone deaths per 100,000 people from 1999 to 2005, the fourth-highest rate in the United States, behind Maine, Utah and Washington.

The CDC said it’s hard to determine whether the increase in opioid-related deaths is due to prescribing practices, a failure by patients to take drugs properly, or illegal abuse.

CDC medical epidemiologist Leonard Paulozzi told Congress in March the drug overdose deaths correspond to the rapidly rising rates of prescription narcotic use reported by the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the overdose deaths are expected to continue.

Statistics through 2005 “probably underestimate the present magnitude of the problem,” Paulozzi said.

•••

There are many ways to get prescription narcotics illegally, said Matt Alberto, deputy chief of investigations for the Nevada Public Safety Department, the state’s lead prescription drug policing agency.

Unscrupulous doctors sell prescriptions for cash. Abusers shop for doctors who prescribe narcotic painkillers without asking many questions. Children fish around in their parents’ medicine cabinets. Patients forge prescriptions. Pharmacy workers, clinic workers and hospital employees steal the drugs.

The most notorious criminal case of a doctor in Las Vegas illegally providing narcotic drugs involves Dr. Harriston Bass Jr., who, according to evidence at his trial, made house calls to prescribe and distribute prescription narcotics.

Bass drove to patients’ homes, conducted 10-minute exams and then sold the patients two or three bottles of 100 pills each — even though he had no license to distribute controlled substances, according to testimony at his trial. He also wrote prescriptions for patients to fill at pharmacies.

Among his patients was Gina Micali, who received about 300 hydrocodone tablets from Bass every other month, plus a prescription for another 180 and one refill. On each visit she also received the muscle relaxant Soma and the anxiety medication Xanax, plus prescriptions for each. In pills and prescriptions, Bass sold Micali a total of about 1,400 pills per visit, said Conrad Hafen, the chief deputy attorney general, who prosecuted the case.

On Oct. 5, 2005, Micali, 38, died after ingesting too many painkillers she got from Bass.

Hafen told the jury that when police searched Bass’ home, they found $150,000 in cash and large quantities of hydrocodone in bottles labeled with the name of his company — DOCS-24-7 — and a wholesale prescription drug company in Illinois.

Alberto said the Illinois company offered no good explanation for why it was selling drugs to a doctor who didn’t have clearance from the Drug Enforcement Administration.

In March, Bass was convicted of second-degree murder in Micali’s death and was found guilty on more than 50 drug-related charges. He was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

A more typical case of illegally diverting prescription painkillers involves Stephanie Ortiz, a former pharmacy technician at four Smith’s grocery stores in Las Vegas. She admitted to the pharmacy board that she gave unauthorized refills of Lortab — a painkiller made with hydrocodone — and free drugs to friends posing as patients. Ortiz filled out refill requests but never faxed or phoned them to physicians for approval, the complaint against her says. She admitted illegally diverting 10,680 doses of the painkiller.

In a letter she wrote admitting her guilt, Ortiz says she started giving the purloined drugs to people she knew, and then got text messages and phone calls saying a random person would come by for another pickup. In exchange for the drugs, Ortiz said, she received VIP tables at nightclubs and access to hotel rooms on busy weekends.

Authorities say young people are cavalier with prescription drugs, sharing them among themselves or sneaking them from their parents and passing them around to their friends. Such a transaction ended in death two years ago this week in Mesquite.

According to an affidavit filed by the Nevada Public Safety Department, Brett Sawyer, 19, was found dead in his bedroom on July 8, 2006. Hidden in a gym bag by his bed was an empty bottle of hydrocodone pills prescribed by a dentist in St. George, Utah, to one of his friends.

Sawyer’s family told investigators he was a drug user. “Brett was the type — if one aspirin worked, three would work better,” his mother said.

Police learned that Sawyer was addicted to OxyContin and often obtained drugs from Cody Morris, who was also an addict and dealt the drugs to his friends.

On July 7, 2006, Morris sold Sawyer three 80 mg OxyContin pills — what some call the Cadillac of prescription narcotics — for $45 each. Morris said he warned Sawyer not to take more than one at a time and to avoid mixing them with alcohol.

Sawyer was dead the next day.

Morris pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to three years’ probation.

Alberto, the investigator, said it’s as common for drug dealers to sell prescription narcotics as it is methamphetamine or cocaine — and more profitable. An ounce of methamphetamine might sell wholesale in Las Vegas for $700, he said, but the same weight in OxyContin pills would be $3,000. He guessed the illegal abuse of prescription painkillers could account for 10 percent of the state’s total use.

Alberto laments that policymakers and the public are focused on street drugs, and virtually ignore the dangers in people’s medicine cabinets. Narcotics investigators for Metro Police do not investigate prescription drug dealing and deal with the drugs only on a reactive basis, a spokesman said.

Yet prescription narcotics are becoming more popular than marijuana for new abusers. The 2006 National Survey on Drug Use and Health found that among new drug abusers, 2.2 million people chose prescription painkillers and 2.1 million preferred marijuana.

Nothing stimulates the brain with pleasure more than drugs. But doctors disagree about the threat of drug addiction. People at risk of becoming addicted to them range from 3 percent to 18 percent of the population, depending on the study or the expert.

Prescription narcotics can change the brain’s chemistry, creating a physical and psychological dependence that compels addicts to forgo career, children, money, sleep, sex and all-around well-being in pursuit of the drug of choice.

Officials with the Nevada Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment Agency say the rise in prescription narcotic addiction in the state cannot be quantified because of the way records are kept. Nationally, a 2006 Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration survey showed that an estimated 5.2 million people 12 and older took narcotic painkillers for nonmedical purposes 30 days before the survey, up from about 4.4 million in 2002.

People seem to think that because the drugs are commercially manufactured and approved by the Food and Drug Administration, their abuse is less risky than that of illicit drugs, said Steve Pasierb, president of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America.

“This is a deadly behavior,” Pasierb said of the drug abuse. “When prescription drugs are abused in the same way as illegal street drugs, they’re every bit as addictive and they’re every bit as deadly.”

Australian actor Heath Ledger died of an accidental overdose of prescription drugs, the New York City medical examiner’s office has announced.

The ruling comes two weeks after the 28-year-old was found dead in his New York apartment. Police found six types of prescription drugs, including pills to treat anxiety and insomnia, in his bedroom and bathroom.
    

Heath Ledger Ledger was found dead on January 22, A spokesman for the medical examiner said Ledger died as a result of "acute intoxication by the combined effects" of the drugs oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, alprazolam and doxylamine.

The drugs are the generic names for the painkiller OxyContin, the anti-anxiety drug Valium, Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug, and the sleep aids Restoril and Unisom.

Hydrocodone is a widely used prescription painkiller.

"We have concluded that the manner of death is accident, resulting from the abuse of prescription medications," the statement added.

Meanwhile, Ledger’s former fiancée Michelle Williams has flown into Australia ahead of the actor’s funeral in the western city of Perth. Dressed in black, Williams was carrying the couple’s two-year-old daughter Matilda as she arrived in Perth on a Qantas flight from Los Angeles.

Matilda clutched a white stuffed rabbit, as the pair was escorted from the terminal amid tight security.

Williams refused to answer questions about plans for Ledger’s funeral, which is expected to take place this week.

The Brokeback Mountain star’s parents, sister and other family members have also arrived back home in Perth after attending two memorial services in the US.

Ledger’s memorial service in Los Angeles drew an A-list of mourners including Tom Cruise and wife Katie Homes.

The Australian won critical acclaim and an Oscar nomination for his performance as a gay cowboy in Brokeback Mountain in 2005, and was regarded as one of Hollywood’s rising stars.

About 1 in 20 high school seniors now acknowledges taking OxyContin, a prescription drug for managing severe pain that, when abused, can be powerfully addictive. In its annual survey of teen drug use, the National Institute on Drug Abuse reports that OxyContin use by 12th graders is up 40 percent nationwide in just three years. Five times as many 12th graders report using OxyContin than report using methamphetamine. The results have been tragic.

Fast-Forming Addiction

Prescription drugs are the second-most used drugs among teens, behind marijuana. Teens are doing stimulants, barbiturates and painkillers. Many don’t realize how highly addictive and dangerous some of these pills can be — OxyContin in particular.

“I was sick as a dog and I was in bed and I couldn’t believe it. I was actually scared,” recalls 17-year-old Ryan, a high school senior from Tewksbury, Mass.

Ryan, who asked that NPR use only his first name, is enrolled at a drug-treatment clinic at Children’s Hospital in Boston. He says he first tried OxyContin at a party when he was 16. Kids crush up the 12-hour time release pills and snort them, so they get hit with all the opiate at once. Ryan says pot made him feel “weirded out.” OxyContin just made him feel good — warm and relaxed. And it’s easy to get.

“There’s always someone who has it,” he says. “There’s kids selling it. I know alone, like, 10 kids selling it themselves.”

But just a week after he started using OxyContin, Ryan realized that if he didn’t get a pill every day or two, he’d start to feel sick. So he kept using it. He says he had no idea how bad he was hooked until the next time he tried to stop.

“It was like somebody was inside of your head with a hammer,” Ryan recalls. “You feel like you’re going to die. Just laying there in the bed, sweat pouring off of you… Then five minutes later, you’re freezing… then you’d be throwing up.”

A Pricey Habit

OxyContin is very expensive on the street: $80 for one pill. To pay for his habit, Ryan says he cashed $7,000 in savings bonds his aunts had given him on birthdays. He sold his PlayStation, leather jackets, cell phone — everything he had — just to stay high and keep from getting sick. He finally broke down and asked his parents for help. Looking back on it, Ryan says he didn’t think using OxyContin would be that dangerous because it was a prescription pill — that made it seem safe. Many different kids at his high school were playing around with it, he says: “People from every sort of group — the burnouts, athletic kids, the geniuses and, like, girls playing wicked-good softball [who were] offered scholarships to places — they would be using it.”

That sentiment is echoed by 18-year-old Mike, a recovering OxyContin addict in Winthrop, Mass. Mike says he was always an athlete and played football. Until his sophomore year in high school, he attended a prep school with wealthier students; he later transferred to the local public school. He says that, if anything, he saw more OxyContin at the prep school.

“All the popular kids — that was the cool thing to do,” Mike says. “It seemed like it was cool because it was so expensive, this big rich drug. And a lot of rich kids were doing it because the poor kids couldn’t afford it.”

OxyContin is so expensive that many teens turn to stealing to support their habit.

“I stole so much money from my parents,” says Katie, 18, who is also a recovering OxyContin habit. She says she and a friend both stole their parents’ ATM cards to support their habits. “I stole $5,000 from my parents in two months.”

Katie also wrote checks from her mother’s checkbook. Katie’s parents say she and her friends stole cameras and jewelry from their house. Somebody stole her father’s wedding ring out of his top drawer.

“It’s like someone just punched you in the stomach,” Katie’s father said in an interview with NPR. “You know you’re never going to get it back. And what did it get used for? The addiction.”

Gateway to Heroin

Katie’s parents say they feel lucky to still have their daughter. More than a year has passed since they enrolled her into a treatment program. She’s relapsed twice. Doctors say OxyContin addiction can plague people for years. And some users move on to heroin. It is much cheaper than OxyContin, and it satisfies the same craving. Instead of $80 a pill, heroin costs about $5 a bag around Boston. One night when Katie was getting sick and desperate, she called a women she’d used OxyContin with before whom she knew also used heroin.

“I didn’t think if she had heroin I would do it,” Katie recalls, “but then when I had that option — to be sick or do this — I did that.”

Deadly Consequences

All the teens interviewed for this story said they knew at least one young person who had overdosed and died recently either on OxyContin or on heroin after first getting hooked on OxyContin. Cheryl Oates of the middle-class suburb of Burlington, Mass., knows the deadly repercussions of OxyContin addiction all too well. Two months ago, her 19-year-old son, Christopher, died of a heroin overdose.

Oates says her son was not the kind of teen one would expect to become a drug addict. He was a captain of his football and wrestling teams at Burlington High School and popular among his teammates. He got good grades and didn’t have behavior problems, Oates says.

“He was the kind of kid who would walk through the mall with me and hold my hand,” Oates says. “He didn’t care what other people thought and said. Christopher was just his own person.”

But by his junior year, Christopher was experimenting with Percocet, another opioid painkiller. It had been prescribed to him for a football injury. By his senior year, he and some friends were using OxyContin; they got hooked. Soon after he graduated, he started using heroin, too.

“The night before Christopher overdosed, we sat in the kitchen and we talked until three in the morning,” Oates says. “And he said he knew he needed help. He was such a good kid and he loved so much. And he got grabbed by something that was greater than him.”

Oates says she’d tell other parents to keep all prescription medications in a locked cabinet, just to make it harder for teens to start experimenting with them. She says it is frightening that more than 5 percent of high school seniors nationally now report using OxyContin in the past year.

Dozens of opiates and related drugs (sometimes called opioids) have been extracted from the seeds of the opium poppy or synthesized in laboratories. The poppy seed contains morphine and codeine, among other drugs. Synthetic derivatives include hydrocodone (Vicodin), oxycodone (Percodan, OxyContin), hydromorphone (Dilaudid), and heroin (diacetylmorphine). Some synthetic opiates or opioids with a different chemical structure but similar effects on the body and brain are propoxyphene (Darvon), meperidine (Demerol), and methadone. Physicians use many of these drugs to treat pain.

Opiates suppress pain, reduce anxiety, and at sufficiently high doses produce euphoria. Most can be taken by mouth, smoked, or snorted, although addicts often prefer intravenous injection, which gives the strongest, quickest pleasure. The use of intravenous needles can lead to infectious disease, and an overdose, especially taken intravenously, often causes respiratory arrest and death.

Addicts take more than they intend, repeatedly try to cut down or stop, spend much time obtaining the drug and recovering from its effects, give up other pursuits for the sake of the drug, and continue to use it despite serious physical or psychological harm. Some cannot hold jobs and turn to crime to pay for illegal drugs. Heroin has long been the favorite of street addicts because it is several times more potent than morphine and reaches the brain especially fast, producing a euphoric rush when injected intravenously. But prescription opiate analgesics, especially oxycodone and hydrocodone, have also become a problem.

In anyone who takes opiates regularly for a long time, nerve receptors are likely to adapt and begin to resist the drug, causing the need for higher doses. The other side of this tolerance is a physical withdrawal reaction that occurs when the drug leaves the body and receptors must readapt to its absence. This physical dependence is not equivalent to addiction. Many patients who take an opiate for pain are physically dependent but not addicted: The drug is not harming them, and they do not crave it or go out of their way to obtain it.

Detoxification

For some addicts, the beginning of treatment is detoxification — controlled and medically supervised withdrawal from the drug. (By itself, this is not a solution, because most addicts will eventually resume taking the drug unless they get further help.) The withdrawal symptoms — agitation; anxiety; tremors; muscle aches; hot and cold flashes; sometimes nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea — are not life-threatening, but are extremely uncomfortable. The intensity of the reaction depends on the dose and speed of withdrawal. Short-acting opiates, like heroin, tend to produce more intense but briefer symptoms.

No single approach to detoxification is guaranteed to be best for all addicts. Many heroin addicts are switched to the synthetic opiate methadone, a longer-acting drug that can be taken orally or injected. Then the dose is gradually reduced over a period of about a week. The anti-hypertensive (blood pressure lowering) drug clonidine is sometimes added to shorten the withdrawal time and relieve physical symptoms.

Methadone Maintenance

Since the 1970s, professionals who care for opiate addicts have reluctantly recognized that many of them will not or cannot stop taking the drug. The solution is maintenance — dispensing opiates under medical supervision. More than 100,000 American addicts are now using methadone as a maintenance treatment. Although it is still politically controversial, this practice has better scientific support than any other treatment for any kind of drug or alcohol addiction.

Because there is a risk of diversion to the illicit market, addicts must come to specialized clinics for methadone, which they take daily in liquid form. A single dose lasts 24–36 hours, and there are few side effects. Some methadone clinics also provide other medical and social services.

Addicts who switch from illicit opiates to methadone avoid the highs and lows and the medical risks of intravenous injection and the criminal behavior that supports it. Studies show that they are less depressed, more likely to hold a job and maintain a family life, less likely to commit crimes, and less likely to contract HIV or hepatitis. Methadone can be continued indefinitely, or the dose can be gradually reduced in preparation for withdrawal. It has been estimated that about 25% of patients eventually become abstinent, 25% continue to take the drug, and 50% go on and off methadone repeatedly.

Buprenorphine

A promising approach to maintenance is the partial opioid agonist buprenorphine. This drug is taken three times a week as a tablet held under the tongue. It occupies opiate nerve receptors and produces a mild opiate-like effect. At higher doses, it continues to produce the same weak effect while displacing more potent drugs. In a person who is physically dependent on opiates, buprenorphine causes a withdrawal reaction. There is some risk of abuse if the tablet is dissolved and injected, so buprenorphine has been made available in combination with the short-acting opiate antagonist naloxone, which has little effect when absorbed under the tongue but neutralizes the effect of injected opiates.

The main advantage of this combination, sold under the name Suboxone, is that patients do not have to come to clinics to take it, because there is no illicit market and no danger of diversion. Since 2002, individual physicians with proper training and certification have been allowed to prescribe buprenorphine in their offices for patients to take home.