Nine teens high on cough medicine at PA high school

I pray I never have to face this with my boys. I educate them as much as I can and keep them very very busy. I also know where there are and who they are with at all times.

My friends and I (and a large portion of my school) went on a robo-trip/corocidin kick when we were sophomores in highschool. Thankfully nothing bad happened to me or any of my friends. The thrill wore off very quickly and now the sight of a Robotussin bottle or box of Coricidin makes me nauseous.

We often did it in school and at family outings. Amazingly no one was ever able to tell that we were messed up on the stuff, even though we were experiencing extreme hallucinations.

I'm now 26 years old, and a successful working professional. Robotripping seems to have been a pretty common experience in my peer group and this was 10 years ago

I worked for many year's as a officer assigned to The Detroit Public School System. And after being assigned to the same high school for several year's I would volunteer to work some of the dance's and concerts. The high school was still a racially mixed public school at the time where most had become predominantly black. We had no racial problems but the kid's liked different thing's especially when it came to music. The white student's had decided to have a rock concert and it was approved by the administration and security was provided and parents also volunteered. This turned out to be a terrible night and the frist time I came into contact with the abuse of over the counter drug's. The kid's had put cold capsules into cough medicine and then drank it before coming. Some had even put cold capsules into alcohol and beer and the effect was what you would expect. They were passing out and throwing up everywhere in the auditoruim. We had to have a EMS unit standby at the location and call parents to come and get their children. I found out later that this type of drug use is more common among white kid's. The black student's used marijunia and maybe alcohol but were afraid of the mixing of chemical's. This is such a dangerous form of addiction because these are item's we all have in our home's and think nothing of.

FS and Charlene, thanks for candidly sharing your story with us here. It sounds like this is something of a chronic problem, taking place over mulitple generations.

FS - Do you think you'd tell your future kids (or some other young person, a niece or nephew, cousin, mentee, etc) about your experience? What would you say to them about OTC use?

As a teacher in an inner city HS, I have experienced this first hand. However, many times I am unaware as to what my students may have taken or smoked. What is even more sad is that most of the time administration fails to do anything about the sitations in schools - and when I have spoken to parents about obvious drug use, the parents do not know what to do about it. There needs to be more out reach to inner city communities ....

Very sad. I agree that there needs to be much more outreach and programs to increase awareness and prevention, as well as interventions programs.