Pharmaceutical Drug Abuse a Frightening Teenage Trend

Summary

---

At CVS pharmacies, you now have to be at least 18 to buy Coricidin Cough & Cold medicine. At Walgreens, there's a three-pack limit on an extra-strength variety of those pills. And at some independently owned drugstores, syrup bottles and blister packs of cough suppressants have vanished from shelves and reappeared behind the counter, near the cigarettes or the prescription drugs.

The nation's pharmacy giants are taking precautions in response to a trend that doctors and anti-drug abuse activists say could grow into an epidemic. Teenagers and young adults are using medicine to get high.

See the full content of this document

Extract

---

Pharmaceutical Drug Abuse a Frightening Teenage Trend

There are other, darker signs: One morning in May, on a lark, five ninth-graders in Loudoun County, Va., swallowed a "cocktail" of Coricidin and the motion-sickness drug Dram...

See the full content of this document

---