About 10 students left Antioch (Ill.) Upper Grade School in ambulances on Oct 29 after ingesting prescription pain pills, the Daily Herald reports. A female student at the school allegedly took hydrocodone pills from her mother’s prescription bottle and distributed them to other students.
None of the students had taken enough of the prescription medication for officials to worry about a drug overdose, but nobody knew if any of the children might be allergic to the drug, either. As a result, all the students were taken to an area hospital for evaluation and their parents called at 11:30 AM.
An investigation ensued, and the female student was advised not to return to school until the investigation was completed. The school is a middle school, which serves students in sixth through eighth grade.
Especially if there are very young children in the house, hydrocodone should be locked up, along with any other drugs. ABC News reported on a study showing that 50 percent of toddlers who take two 5-mg tablets of hydrocodone become rapidly ill within an hour. For infants, even half of a tablet of hydrocodone can be lethal. First, they become lethargic, then they stop breathing and die.
More and more teens are turning away from illegal drugs and using prescription drugs to get high, the Baltimore Sun wrote in 2010. Hydrocodone’s effects are similar to those of heroin, although its medical use is as a pain killer. “With … drug overdoses ranking second only to motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of accidental death, the nation needs to discard the idea that enforcement alone can eliminate our drug problem,” the Sun quoted R Gil Kerlikowske, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, as saying, as he presented an increase in spending on prevention programs now in place in many communities.
There must also be prevention in every home, where somebody probably has a prescription pill bottle or two in the medicine cabinet. Keep the bottles locked up.
