Inquiry into the misuse/abuse of benzodiazepines and other forms of pharmaceutical drugs in Victoria : final report / Drugs and Crime Prevention Committee.

  • Victoria. Parliament. Drugs and Crime Prevention Committee
Date:
2007
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: Inquiry into the misuse/abuse of benzodiazepines and other forms of pharmaceutical drugs in Victoria : final report / Drugs and Crime Prevention Committee. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    However, other media sources have questioned the extent, or existence, of the phenomenon. Online United States media critic Jack Shafer, on his website ‘Slate’, did an extensive piece on the media coverage. This is summarised below from the ‘Join Together’ site: Media reports about parties where youths throw various prescription pills into a bowl at parties first surfaced in 2002, and were echoed in 2003 in a newsletter from the federal Center for Substance Abuse Prevention. More recently, USA Today reported that addiction counselors are “beginning to hear about similar pill-popping parties, which are part of a rapidly developing underground culture that surrounds the rising abuse of prescription drugs by teens and young adults”. But Shafer said the original story quoted no teens or other witnesses to these alleged parties, and said most subsequent stories either relied on anecdotes or were based on earlier reports. National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) chairman Joseph A. Califano Jr. also referenced pharming parties in 2005, when he released a report called, “Under the Counter: The Diversion and Abuse of Controlled Prescription Drugs in the U.S.”. But Shafer said that CASA officials told him that Califano was not citing any research. “CASA does not have quantitative data on the subject of pharming parties; however, we know that the trend exists based on focus groups we have conducted with teens and young adults for various CASA reports where we talk with them about prescription drugs at parties and this is the basis of Mr. Califano’s quote”, said CASA spokesperson Lauren Duran (Join Together 2006, accessed 21 July 2006). The Committee received evidence about the phenomenon of pharming parties when it visited North America in July/August 2007. Drug and alcohol experts confirmed that these gatherings were certainly taking place, but according to Mr Michael Cunningham, Deputy Director of California’s Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs: [f]rankly ..we don’t have a lot of firm hard core data which shows the extent to which they [pharming parties] are taking place and we don’t have any real information which verifies that as a result of pharming x amount of overdoses, or x amount of deaths [have occurred]; right now it tends to be just anecdotal information. !°7 Representatives of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) also told the Committee that whilst ‘there isn’t a lot of scientific evidence about valium parties, there’s a boat load of [them] going on. There’s no doubt about that’.'°8 Certainly pharming parties are relatively common among teenagers in Kentucky according to Dave Sallengs of Kentucky’s Drug Enforcement Branch: There is a phenomenon which is going on in the USA right now called pharming parties...it’s a big problem with teenagers, they take bags of miscellaneous drugs, they call it trail mix!>?because of the appearance, they get these drugs out of their parents’ medicine cabinets at home, they call that pharming where they go into the medicine cabinet, they get the pills out, take them to these parties, throw them in the bowl... Another trick teenagers are picking up on, they mix an ounce of [codeine based cough syrup] with sports drinks and throw in a Jolly Rancher candy which | suppose makes it fizz or 157. Mr Michael Cunningham, Chief Deputy Director, California Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs, Meeting with the Drugs and Crime Prevention Committee, Inquiry into the Misuse/Abuse of Benzodiazepines and Other Forms of Pharmaceutical Drugs in Victoria, Sacramento, 2 August 2007. 158 Representative of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Meeting with Drugs and Crime Prevention Committee, Inquiry into the Misuse/Abuse of Benzodiazepines and Other Forms of Pharmaceutical Drugs in Victoria, Washington DC, 30 July 2007. 159 For an account of how the Internet can be used to download ‘recipes’ for the ‘trail mix’, see Chapter 5.3 of this Report.