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Saturday Morning News

Authorities Issue Warn About Dangers of Teenagers Mixing Household Drugs

Aired April 1, 2000 - 8:27 a.m. ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: Authorities say a dangerous new trend is developing among drug users. Many of them, mostly teenagers, are experimenting with various drug combinations to reach their high.

And as CNN's Frank Buckley reports, they're not scoring these drugs from the street corners, but in the home.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

FRANK BUCKLEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): They're called drug cocktails, mixing different drugs together to achieve a high, some of the drugs coming right from the family medicine cabinet. Students using prescription drugs and street drugs simultaneously in a pharmacological roulette.

DR. MITCH ROSENTHAL, PHOENIX HOUSE: They're very vulnerable. They don't know what they're doing. They're mixing potent chemicals.

BUCKLEY: Police in Hartford, Connecticut believe the recent death of a student at Trinity College may have involved the mixing of various prescription drugs with others. No one knows just how widespread the practice is, but a survey of students at the University of Wisconsin revealed one out of five had tried illicit prescription drugs and 50 percent of the respondents knew students who abused them.

(on camera): How many of you have mixed?

(voice-over): All of these teenagers say they've mixed drugs together. The high school aged students are recovering drug addicts at the Phoenix House Treatment Center in Lake Ranconcoma (ph), Long Island.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT: I used to mix Depacote (ph), Ritalin and Ecstasy together.

BUCKLEY (on camera): And how did you get them?

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT: How did I get them? I was prescribed to Depacote and Ritalin so I would just take more than I was supposed to.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT: I used to just get it on the streets from friends, you know, people taking it from their parents, from drugstores. They'd get like bottles of it and just give it to me. BUCKLEY (voice-over): Another source, the Internet, say experts, which provides information on different drugs and even sales of prescription drugs to buyers who don't have prescriptions.

GEN. BARRY MCCAFFREY, OFFICE OF DRUG CONTROL & POLICY: The Internet's opened all sorts of possibilities for people to order substances, to include from foreign countries, the Netherlands, wherever, have them come to them through the international mails. They don't understand the potential pharmacology of the substances they're taking.

BUCKLEY: These students say they never bought online, but they learned a lot about how to get high.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT: Online you have access to like Web sites and chat rooms that give out information, you know, about drugs, you know, what they do to you, their effects.

ROSENTHAL: They start searching to say well, you know, this drug may be cheaper, this drug may have some effects that I didn't know about and they start to see how they can take several drugs in the course of the day or in the course of several hours.

BUCKLEY: These days, the recovering addicts the Phoenix House are spending their hours learning about themselves, about their addictions and about how to face the rest of their lives one day at a time.

Frank Buckley, CNN, Lake Ranconcoma, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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