Massachusetts Personal Injury Library

Some Teens Popping Pain Pills to Get High

Some adults and teens have been crushing pain pills and snorting the powder to get high, according to doctors who study addiction, said The New York Times.

Costing the nation $11 billion

The misuse and abuse of prescription pain pills actually costs the nation billions of dollars, according to the article.

Some drug-makers are looking at producing prescription pain medications in different forms to discourage this kind of abuse, according to the article. Some pills being developed are harder to crush, others cause reactions in the body like flushing or itching to discourage this abuse, and one pill has an outer layer and an inner core that if tampered with counters the high of the pain reliever, according to the Times.

Other solutions

Another part of the problem is regulating abuses in different states, and one way to do this is to allocate more resources to develop online prescription monitoring systems, said the article. This would be a database used by pharmacists and doctors to check on which patients have multiple opioid prescriptions, that might indicate drug abuse, said the Times.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is developing a comprehensive risk management system for sustained release opioids, that might require a certificate for doctors who prescribe and pharmacies that dispense painkillers, said the Times.

They could also expand this project to include a patient training program to advise them not to share their prescribed opioids with friends or relatives, that it's a felony and could kill them, said the Times.

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