When Jayalakshmi (name changed) found her 14-year-old son drowsy and irritable all the time, she thought it would be the teenage hormones going berserk. Despite noticing declining grades and other behavioural red flags, it never occurred to her that the boy could be into substance abuse.
She had often seen a seemingly harmless strip of tablets, the size and shape of paracetamol, in his school bag. But the possibility of it being nitrazepam, a psychiatric drug with sedative properties, never occurred to her. It turned out that the Class 9 student was an addict of a different kind — he preferred palliative care and psychiatric medicines instead of ganja or synthetic options.
One reason for the misuse of these prescription drugs is that they are ‘safe’ — not easy to detect and relatively risk-free in transporting. “If you are using other drugs, there will be traces of it in your blood and urine. But in the case of prescription drugs, even a blood test will do no good,” says Shahul Ameen, psychiatrist, St. Thomas Hospital, Changanassery.
He adds that parents approach him with issues ranging from laziness to temper tantrums and the children reveal the truth only after some time.
“Very young students have confessed to using prescription drugs. I have seen students from Class 8 misusing medicines usually prescribed for sleeping disorders. None of them say who the suppliers are and since our priority is to treat them, we don’t prod,” adds Dr. Ameen.
Illegal channels
Along with convenience, low price and availability also attract young customers to such medicines. “They are medicines prescribed for patients in the last stages of cancer who cannot be revived.
They are easy to carry and not very costly. There are supplier rings and we have issued strict instructions to all pharmacists. There can be other illegal channels as well. The drugs may be reaching Kerala from other States. And yes, the number of cases are definitely on the rise,” says G. Muralidharan Nair, deputy commissioner, Excise Department.
Sources say many agents have now switched to prescription medicines as sourcing them is a lot easier. “They don’t have to undertake a risky trip to Madurai or Dindigul to transport them. A lobby has been providing theses medicines to the agents for a while. There were incidents where opioid drugs from palliative care units attached to government hospitals had gone missing,” says a source from the Health Department.
