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Kids Abusing Cold Medicine Disturbing Trend

Posted on: Thursday, 31 March 2005, 09:00 CST

Sharon Smith found the empty packets of cold medicine and bottles of cough syrup in her son's room, but he told her the medications made him feel intelligent and invincible, just as he had learned from the Internet.

It's just cold medicine, he rationalized. How much harm could it do?

But it did not take long for Smith's son to turn from a shy, easygoing teenager into what she calls "a raving lunatic." He would drink four bottles of cough syrup at a time, or swallow tablets of Coricidin Cough and Cold, and become furiously angry and violent, breaking things in his house and punching the wall.

Since then, he's been in and out of the hospital, incarcerated twice, and plagued with mental health problems that doctors say might affect him for the rest of his life.

"You can take a sweet loving child and they become something that you are afraid of -- you can't even believe it's your child," said Smith, of Mechanicsburg, Pa., about the dangers of over-the-counter cold medicine. "It's an awful, awful roller coaster for parents."

Cold medicine and cough syrup have been around for decades, and kids have experimented with them for just as long, but a string of recent incidents suggest the problem is becoming more widespread.

In the past six months, teenagers from Seattle to Ohio to Florida have either died or been hospitalized because of cold-tablet overdoses. The number of calls to poison control centers about teens abusing DXM -- the active ingredient in these cold medicines -- has more than doubled from 2000 to 2003.

In Pennsylvania alone, three men were caught stealing Coricidin tablets from a Wal-Mart in Ebensburg last week. The same day, a convenience store owner in Westmont was charged with child endangerment for selling boxes of cold medicine and cigarettes to a 14-year-old. And in the last month, three teens have overdosed on Coricidin in one school district, according to the Allegheny County District Attorney's office.

By surfing the Internet, teens can readily learn how to abuse cold medicine and read about its potent effects. They can head over to any drugstore and buy packets of the medicine without doing anything illegal. And they can slip right under the radar of even the most vigilant parents who are looking for kids reeking of cigarette smoke or alcohol.

These cold medicines contain dextromethorphan, or DXM, a substance that can cause feelings of detachment, distorted perceptions, and a dreamlike or euphoric state. High dosages can also cause blurred vision, shallow breathing, fever, coma, an increase in heart rate, and in some users, acute anger.

Source: Cincinnati Post

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