For the third straight year, a Partnership for a Drug-Free America (PDFA) study has found that about 20 percent of U.S. teens have misused prescription painkillers like Vicodin and OxyContin, even as smoking and drinking decline, the Associated Press reported May 16.

Researchers expressed concern that use of prescription drugs may be becoming entrenched among youth, many of whom believe that using these painkillers to get high is safer than taking illicit drugs. According to the PDFA's 2005 Partnership Attitude Tracking Study, 40 percent of 7th- to 12th-graders said that prescription drugs were "much safer" than illicit drugs, 31 percent said there was nothing wrong with occasional use of these drugs, and 29 percent thought that prescription painkillers were not addictive.

Teens also told researchers that prescription drugs were easy to get: 62 percent said they could get powerful painkillers at home, and 52 percent said the drugs were "available everywhere."

"That's why we're putting a lot of our attending on educating parents," said PDFA president and CEO Steve Pasierb said. "They don't have a frame of reference in a lot of cases. This kind of behavior (prescription drug abuse) didn't exist when they were teens."

The study also found that 22 percent of respondents smoked, and 33 percent said they had consumed alcohol within the past 30 days.