Prescription drug use prevalent in local high schools

As a junior at East Chapel Hill High School, all Ben Peltzer wanted to do was direct his own one-act play in a theater class.

But he said his school counselor encouraged him to forego his directing dreams and instead sign up for an Advanced Placement class.

Peltzer, a freshman at UNC, said this sort of pressure to succeed was not unusual in Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools, and that sometimes students would abuse prescription drugs to perform better.

“There’s this really common belief at both East and UNC that prescription drugs like Adderall or Ritalin turn you into this hyper-focused student,” he said. “Nobody really considers that it’s a prescription drug for a mental illness, and should be treated that way.”

The need to succeed

Stephanie Willis, the school district’s health coordinator, said in the district’s 2011 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, about 11.3 percent of high school students admitted to taking a prescription drug without a prescription — a decrease from 12.8 percent in 2009. The survey is taken every two years.

The schools’ prevalence rate isn’t far from national trends. In 2010, 6.5 percent of 12th graders abused Adderall alone, according the University of Michigan’s 2010 “Monitoring the Future” study.

In CHCCS’ 2011 survey, about 16 percent of juniors admitted to abusing prescription drugs, while only 11 percent of sophomores and 10 percent of seniors admitted to abusing them.

Elise Alexander, a licensed clinical addiction specialist in Durham, said the schools’ jump in junior year prescription drug use could be the result of added pressure for students to perform well in 11th grade.

She said many students misuse prescription drugs commonly prescribed for people with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools requires juniors to take the PSAT and ACT, and encourages students to take SAT prep classes after school, Peltzer said.

Eleventh grade is also the year that most college admissions offices focus on, so many students are encouraged to take additional AP classes to boost their GPA, said UNC freshman Maggie Poole, who also attended East Chapel Hill High School.

“CHCCS puts too much pressure on kids to achieve certain GPAs and take a certain number of AP classes,” Poole said. “Students are brought up to believe that these are the things that define success in high school.”

Supply and demand

Chapel Hill police Lt. Jabe Hunter said local adolescents are more often caught with Adderall than other prescription drugs, such as painkillers like Vicodin.

Although the narcotics division hasn’t arrested a lot of adolescents for prescription drug abuse, they are still mindful of the issue, said Capt. Danny Lloyd.

Lloyd said easy accessibility of these drugs is an issue for police.

“Adderall was passed around like candy before tests, exams and the SAT,” Laurie Janzen, who also attended East Chapel Hill High School, said in a Facebook message. “The majority of my friends have bought or sold Adderall for these purposes.”

Willis said the school system knows that prescription drug abuse is a problem for students, but that it is difficult to track usage in schools.

“With alcohol, we can breathalyze students if there is a really strong indication it’s needed,” she said. “We can’t do that with prescription drugs.”

But she said the best thing parents can do to prevent this misuse is lock their medicine cabinets.

“The drugs we suspect kids are abusing are the ones that they get out of their parents’ medicine cabinets that are at home,” she said.

Every May, Chapel Hill police work with Home Instead Senior Care to complete Mission Medicine events, which encourage seniors to properly dispose of their prescription medications.

“Recently, we have seen more inter-generational homes with people moving grandparents into homes with teens and children,” said Stephen Lair, Chapel Hill franchise owner of the organization. “And sometimes those medications will get into the wrong hands.”

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