Glancing impatiently into the cabinet, the teen scans the drawer for their pill. Looking up and down the drawer they scan the prescriptions. Aha! They’ve found the one. When I say, their pill, I don’t mean the one they’ve been prescribed. It’s their parents oxycontin after an old surgery. The teen grabs a couple 30mg pills and frantically puts the bottle away where it belongs. The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) says 62% of teens say that getting pills from their parents medicine cabinet is easy.

According to School Officer J. Johnson pharmaceutical pill abuse at school is huge. ”We see pharmaceutical pill abuse not only at school, but as a society as well,” stated Johnson. People take pills on a daily basis. Do you have a headache? Take some ibuprofen. Not getting enough sleep? Take some sleeping medication. Suffering from irritability? Maybe lay off those painkillers. Regardless of how we as a society look at it, pills are all around us.

Due to legality of pill abuse our inside informant remained anonymous for this story. According to a senior boy pills weren’t just a way to get high; “For me pills were an escape. Xanax is great, I could take as much as I want, and be able to get away from the daily life. It was easier to forget things that I had struggled with” he said.

When asking the anonymous post narcotic user how he got a hold of his prescription, he began to cough furiously, sounding as though he had been extracting phlegm from the back of his throat. After his fit he looked me in the eyes with blank straight stare, “Can I get some cough medicine?,” boom it’s as easy that. “It’s easy to get a hold of any prescription. You could be completely healthy, and just be showing your signs and symptoms to the doctor you can get a hold of almost anything,” he said. Students can call up a friend, or they can even just get directly from a doctor.

A 2011 NIDA study says that 52 million people in the US alone have used prescription drugs for nonmedical purposes. Johnson says, “The current trend with pills is behind on the statistics. Parents are not aware of the problem.” Teens can obtain these prescriptions at ease. According to Johnson the drug deals are going on in the classrooms. Getting them from a friend or even from a parent’s cabinet can be done easily.

So what’s the big deal? They’re just pills, This concept is part of the reason why the pill epidemic has taken such a full blown launch at kids. According to survey at the university of Texas in the top 12 reasons teens abuse pills; 21% of parents do not care as much about getting caught with pills opposed to getting caught with some other illicit substance. A powerful thought, especially when about 7,000 people end up in the emergency room daily from not properly taking these drugs. “I wish these students understood the facts, beside the behaviors, they don’t know about the effects like damages to the liver” said Johnson.

It’s important for teens to understand what there getting themselves into. “There is definitely slippery slope when you it comes to these types of things,” the anonymous post narcotic user said. “Honestly if I would’ve kept using the way I did for even a week or two more, I could’ve probably been in really bad shape.” Stopping habits like this now can lead to having a better, healthier, and more promising future.

To learn more click here to hear about the FDA’s new release about the pill pandemic