Luis Manuel Pulido was tired, fed up and overwhelmed with the situation around him.
His parents fought constantly, the neighborhood where he lived was a hotbed of gang members, and his classmates were aggressive towards him.
One day the 18-year-old decided he had to escape from the reality that surrounded him and to do so he chose the fake escape of drugs.
His drug of choice was not marijuana or cocaine or amphetamines, he had no money to buy such drugs.
In a party one afternoon, a friend showed him the devastating way a home remedy can be used to try to escape from reality.
That day, Pulido gulped down half a bottle of Robitussin, a syrup that doctors prescribe to patients suffering from a cough.
"It hit me very hard, I hardly remember anything but that's what I wanted, to not know anything or anyone," said Pulido, who last week was nine months sober thanks to a support program implemented by the juvenile court of San Diego.
"After that first time, I kept doing drugs with other medicines that were in my house," he said.
Pulido's case is not an isolated situation.
In San Diego County one of every four children under 18 take prescription drugs to get high, according to federal figures.
According to David Mineta, the White House's director for control of prohibited substances, the abuse in consumption of prescription drugs has quadrupled.
"It is a major public health problem in the country" Mineta acknowledged, explaining that the consumption of prescription drugs among teenagers 12 to 18 rose from 2.2 percent to 9.9 percent between 1998 and 2008.
Statistics show that the medicines teenagers seek the most at home or among their friends are pain killers.
In the past 10 years, the consumption of pills for pain control among young people nationwide rose from 6.8 percent to 26.5 percent.
It's estimated that each year in the United States 912,500 children use medications to get drugged.
The situation is so serious that drug abuse has become the second leading cause of death among children under 18 in the country.
Only deaths from car accidents are higher than those who die by abusing drugs sold in pharmacies with or without prescription.
"This situation is not fixed by arresting young people who use drugs to get high," said the director of the Drug Enforcement Administration in San Diego, Ralph Partridge.
"What we have to do is to inform them about the dangers of getting high with medicine," said the official. "And we have to make parents see how easy it is for their kids get these drugs."
The most common medicines that young people use to get high are found in the medicine cabinet of every household.
Cough syrups and pain killers such as Vicodin and OxyContin topped the list of drugs used by young addicts.
"The over-consumption of these drugs, unlike other drugs such as marijuana, is not because the young man wants to experience new sensations," said Carmen Perez from the Phoenix House, an organization located in northern San Diego County that helps rehabilitate young prescription drug addicts.
"The main goal of teenagers who take medicine as drugs is to avoid at all costs the reality around them," Perez added.
An example of this is Alvin N., who chose home remedies to escape his reality.
"I use to take muscle relaxants, with them you don't feel euphoria or depression, what they do is disconnect you from reality, they get you out of this world," said the 17-year-old who, like Luis Manuel Pulido, has not taken drugs in nine months thanks to the rehabilitation program offered by the San Diego juvenile court.
"Our mission is to tell parents to keep an eye on their children and to destroy medicine that they no longer use," said Partridge, who eloquently stated his concern about this problem that has taken the life of 3,769 teenagers in California in the past three years.
"I do not want to see any more parents burying their children from a prescription drug overdose."
Abraham.nudelstejer@sandiegored.com
[sidebar]Information and help
The San Diego Sheriff's Department offers information to help prevent the abuse of prescription drugs.
Kids Health offers information on the abuse of medications in Spanish
The organizations that help teen addicts include:
Phoenix House
785 Grand Ave, # 220, Carlsbad, (760) 729.2830.
SAFIR Rehabilitation Center
4990 Williams Ave., La Mesa, 619.668.4250
Information is available in Spanish.
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