WASHINGTON (AP) – Teens increasingly are getting high with legal drugs like painkillers and mood stimulants, and they’re turning to cough syrup as well, says a government survey released Thursday.

The annual study by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, conducted by the University of Michigan, showed mixed results in the nation’s longtime campaign against teen drug abuse.

It found that while fewer teens overall drank alcohol or used illegal drugs in the last year, a small but growing number were popping prescription painkillers like OxyContin and Vicodin and stimulants like Ritalin.

As many as one in every 14 high school seniors said they used cold medicine “fairly recently” to get high, the study found.

It was the first year that the government tracked the frequency of teens who reported getting high from over-the-counter medicine for coughs and colds.

“It’s bad that kids are buying cough syrup and using it this way – it’s not good for them,” said John P. Walters, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

The study found about one in 10 high school seniors have abused the painkiller Vicodin and Walters said kids may be pilfering the pills from their parents’ medicine cabinets.

“That is one thing you can do – take the pills that are no longer being used and throw them away, get rid of them,” he said in an interview.

Walters credited public service advertising with a steady decrease in overall teen drug use over the past five years and said the agency would shift some of its 2007 advertising budget toward combatting prescription drug abuse.

He challenged the recommendations of an August government audit that said the anti-drug advertising campaign wasn’t working and suggested Congress consider reducing its funding. The report by the Government Accountability Office found some children were actually more likely to use marijuana after seeing the ads.

“We’re pushing back,” Walters told reporters Thursday as he outlined the study results. “What this shows is we’re pushing back successfully.”

The rise in prescription drug abuse was a troubling conclusion in a study that Walters described as good news overall because of the drop in teen use of alcohol, cigarettes, marijuana and other illicit substances.

An estimated 840,000 fewer teens reported using illegal drugs now compared to five years ago, he said.

That teens are turning to cough syrup to get high is particularly alarming, experts said, because the medicine is cheap and easy to get. Moreover, few people – teens and their parents alike – recognize the dangers of overdosing on the otherwise safe and legal drugs.

“There is this mistaken belief that intentionally abusing prescription and over-the-counter drugs is somehow safer than abusing street drugs,” said Steve Pasierb, president and chief executive of the New York-based Partnership for Drug Free America. “What parents don’t realize is that this is about your kids taking six pills with a beer.”


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