CDC: One in Five Teens Has Abused Prescription Meds

Twenty percent of U.S. high-school students have taken prescription drugs without a prescription, according to the results of a CDC survey released June 3. A separate report, also issued June 3 by the agency, estimates the direct health care costs of opioid abuse to be more than $9 billion a year and offers recommendations for physicians, payers and government agencies to help curb such abuse.

"Teens and others have a false assumption that prescription drugs are a safer high," said Grant Baldwin, Ph.D., M.P.H., director of the CDC's Injury Center Division of Unintentional Injury Prevention, in a June 3 media statement. "These data and that from other sources show us that prescription drug misuse is a significant problem in both adolescents and adults."

The 2009 national Youth Risk Behavior Survey (4-page PDF; About PDFs), or YRBS, has been conducted every other year since 1991, but this is the first time the survey has included questions about prescription drug use.

The announcement about the YRBS findings coincided with the release of a CDC report on unintentional drug poisoning (4-page PDF; About PDFs) among both teens and adults that indicates 26,400 unintentional drug overdose deaths occurred in 2006. During that year, opioids were involved in more fatal overdoses than heroin and cocaine combined.

The drug poisoning report included the following recommendations for physicians:

The CDC report also includes recommendations for private insurance providers, pharmacy benefit managers, and state and federal agencies to aid them in identifying patients who are using opioids for nonmedical uses and notifying prescribing physicians about such patients.

Furthermore, the report recommends that payers should only reimburse opioid prescription claims from a single designated physician and a single designated pharmacy. And state and federal agencies should work to improve the availability of substance abuse treatment services, the report says.

According to the report, there has been a 10-fold increase in the medical use of opioids during the past 15 years as clinicians have become more aggressive in managing patients' pain. During that time, painkillers have been increasingly associated with nonmedical uses and are widely available in illicit markets.

The Drug Abuse Warning Network, or DAWN, which is operated by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, estimates that in 2008, prescription and OTC drugs used nonmedically were involved in roughly the same number of emergency department visits as illicit drugs, with legal and illegal drugs each being linked to about 1 million visits.

Opioids were associated with 306,000 visits, and benzodiazepines were associated with 272,000 visits.

DAWN estimates that people ages 12-20 accounted for 14.5 percent of emergency department visits for nonmedical use of pharmaceuticals in 2008. That figure does not include suicide attempts.