Wouldn't it be nice if all you had to worry about were kids sneaking a cigarette or stealing a beer out of the fridge? Not that those are good things, but they are pretty harmless compared to this kind of thing. Pharma companies should not be allowed to advertise on television unless it is just for OTC things. The culture has shifted from street drugs to scripts as they seem "better" or less risky because of the script drug media in people's faces constantly on prime time.

It's a little more than "sharing to avoid seeing a doctor". That's a little naive. These drugs are used as recreation, too by teens. I was astounded by what a high school teacher told me concerning "bucket parties" where kids toss scripts into a bucket and reach and pull out a pill to take.

What really jerks my chain is the commercials where you see children diagnosing their parent’s ailments via the internet and suggesting brand name medication with the authority of doctors. Availability is definitely a problem and advertising has probably contributed to that, but our cultural norms play a large part. We’ve been raised to treat the symptoms, not the root cause. Root causes may necessitate life style changes – who wants to deal with that? Why exercise and eat a balanced diet to get good night’s sleep when you can take some script? Remember that Rolling Stones song “Mother’s Little Helper?” It seems that mother’s pills have come home to roost!

I wouldn't believe "bucket parties" were a common phenomenon or even existent without seeing it myself. Sounds like typical sensationalism and exaggeration. Teens are dumb, but that dumb? We aren't just talking about recreational use. Its obvious that exists. But sharing antibiotics and anti-acne medication is not recreation. This makes it seem like teens view doctors as predictable, and a hassle to be avoided when possible. The only solution, as I see it, is to send the drug-dispensing teens to medical school.

Please don't tell me this is the first you people heard of bucket parties??I'm 46 and I've known of this for years!! And you people are worried that pot is dangerous that's why I tell my kids it's OK to smoke pot but to stay away from man made drugs!!It's worked so far all my kids are doctors and Lawyers

Medical School? Say what? Don't know exactly how that applies to any of the discussion. Just for the record "Bucket parties" or "pharming parties" as they are called here are not just typical sensationalism or exaggeration. They happenmore often than we think. We learn this from teen focus groups. I don't know that it's a question of teens necessarily "being dumb", as not having all the frontal cortex equipment developed and plugged in. Teen brains simply aren't equipped to assess risk the way that healthy adult brains do.

As for why the other one-quarter passed pharmaceuticals around, maybe it was just to throw the dice, a kind of adventure? That's why God gave us cannabis, but the tobacco companies have gotten the cannabis prohibition they paid for with their over $30-bil./year tax bonanza, helping create the above-deplored result.

God given cannabis? Was it really falling from the skies? Lawd! I must have missed that chapter of the Bible.

Why have the pot guys hijacked this thread? Do you really have to chime in with the tired old "pot is God's gift to man" crusade after all of these articles? This web site is intended to provide information for people about substance abuse treatment and legislation. Take your propaganda to High Times! What a disgrace!

God gave us Poison Ivy too, but I'm not going to roll some up and smoke it. Not that I'm against de-criminalizing pot, I just think the God-given Or "it's organic" arguement just doesn't work.

The last time a cure was found for a disease was 1959. Dr. Jonas Salk Developed the vaccine for polio. Since that time, hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on disease. Not for a cure, but for drug treatment only. A cure would put big pharmaceutical companies out of business. It should be the job of a physician to prescribe the best treatments to a patient, instead of patients asking doctors to prescribe these drugs to them. By advertising these drugs, the pharmaceutical companies are involving themselves in a legal drug trade that is killing thousands of people every day. Many of these drugs, such as Chantix, Floxin, and Viagra have proven deadly. Statistics prove prescription drugs are 16,400% more deadly than terrorists. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in 1998, a report finds that prescription drugs kill about 106,000 Americans each year – that’s three times as many as are killed by automobiles—making prescription drug death the fourth leading killer after heart disease, cancer and stroke. The rise in deaths coincides with the direct marketing of prescription medication to the public. Every day it’s estimated 2,500 teens abuse a prescription pain killer for the first time. It is time to stop this form of advertising by the pharmaceutical companies.

I thought my 24 year old son who was an "experienced" prescription drug abuser, who struggled with addiction and recovery for over 8 years would have known what could kill him. But all it took for him to die of an accidental overdose was tablet form methadone and valium. When I hear of these pharm or bucket parties, it terrifies me. When we have family members that abuse drugs, it's a long difficult road to travel and when they die, it's another excruciating journey. I wouldn't wish either on anyone. That's why I'm working so hard on Prevention efforts in my community. When I have spoken with youth in high schools, they have told me that they didn't think prescription drugs could kill you. We have a lot of work to do to help everyone understand what they're dealing with. I do appreciate all of the information and resources provided through Join Together.

When are we going to realize that the pharmaceutical industry has created this "pain management" myth to make MORE MONEY and that the health insurance industry has supported it to save themselves money. It's cheaper to put patients on a pain mgmt. program - OPIATES - than it is to foot the bill for physical therapy. Needless to say, the patients WILL always be COMING BACK for more. And since everyone now has these nifty drugs in their medicine cabinets, how can we possibly tell our children just how dangerous, addictive and deadly these drugs truly are when we are using them ourselves at a rate never seen before??? Talk about hypocrisy and pure ignorance. No wonder Heroin has become the problem it has - it's the cheapest opiate out there and kids addicted to pain killers simply can't afford to pay $ 20 to $ 70.00 per pill to get high. We have become the dumbest nation in the world - we have stopped asking the "pertinent questions" that Al Gore refers to in his book. We are a flock of sheep that swallows each and every "pill" the drug industry feeds us and I am ashamed for us all and devastated for the thousands of kids that will fall victim to this opiate epidemic that WE, ourselves have created!!!!