More teenagers today say it's easier to illegally obtain prescription drugs than beer, and they view drug abuse as a bigger problem than their parents do, a national report found.
The report lays much of the blame for teenage drug abuse on problem parents, calling them "passive pushers" because they don't lock their medicine cabinets and often don't know where their kids are on school nights.
Teens get nearly half of their illegal prescription drugs from their home or the homes of friends, according to the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse's survey released Thursday.
For the first time in the report's 13-year history, more teenagers said those drugs - mostly high-powered painkillers - were easier to get than beer.
"Problem parents are a big part of why so many teens smoke, drink, get drunk and abuse illegal and prescription drugs," Joseph Califano, head of the Columbia University-based center, wrote in the report. "When parents are not part of the solution, they become part of the problem."
Parents need to lock up their medicine, have more family dinners, model positive behavior and pay closer attention to the comings and goings of their teenage sons and daughters, suggested the report, based on a survey of 1,002 12- to 17-year-olds and 312 of their parents.
Kids and their parents view the problem differently.
Among surveyed teens, 28 percent said drug and alcohol use is the biggest problem they face, while only 17 percent of parents cited it among their top 10 worries.
And while only 14 percent of parents said their teenage kids regularly leave to hang out with friends on school nights, nearly half of teens said they are frequently out late during the week.
The generational disconnect is a problem because half of the teens who reported coming home come after 10 p.m. on weeknights said they're exposed to people who are drinking, smoking pot or using other illicit drugs.
"Perhaps we need to revive the old public service announcement that used to run on television, 'It's 10 p.m.: Do you know where your child is?' " Califano wrote.
Abuse of prescription drugs by teens edged up slightly, according to the report, with 24 percent saying they have a friend or classmate using pills - up from 21 percent last year, but slightly lower than the rate in 2003.
The center repeated its call for parents to demand drug-free schools, but noted that only 49 percent of parents today believe that's a realistic goal.
Not everyone thinks Mom and Dad should receive so much blame.
It's counterproductive to point fingers at parents, because drug and alcohol abuse is a societal problem, said Frank Couch, who counsels parents and kids for the Seattle-based Science and Management of Addictions Foundation, a teen-addiction referral network for parents.
"I thought it was, quite honestly, kind of offensive to parents," Couch said of the report. "There should be more energy put into busting the stigma around addiction than pointing fingers at parents."
Parents control one of the most effective tools to stem teenage drug use - the family dinner, according to the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse.
Teenagers who break bread with their parents two or fewer times a week are more than twice as likely to have tried marijuana, the report found.
Fortunately, the percentage of teens regularly eating dinner with their families has remained stable in recent years at around 58 percent, a level that's higher than the center found in one of its first surveys, in 1996.
But sometimes teens go awry even with strong parental involvement.
Cassie Undlin said she regularly ate dinner with her daughter, went to her soccer and basketball games, and tried everything she knew to help. But her daughter still became addicted to crack cocaine, which led to at least five visits to rehab clinics and 15 stints in jail.
Today, her daughter has been sober for seven months.
"None of it worked until my daughter wanted it to work," said Undlin, who sits on the parent advisory panel for the Science and Management of Addictions Foundation. "I would say (there are) a higher percentage of parents who are not problems."
The report also found that many teenagers can easily obtain marijuana, with 23 percent saying they can buy it within an hour and 42 percent saying it would only take a day.
Half of older teenagers, those age 16 to 17, said smoking marijuana is more common today than smoking cigarettes.
Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, said increasing abuse of prescription drugs by teens is a serious concern.
"Kids think that because these are medicines that are prescribed, they are safe," she told The Washington Post.
"The problem is that there is very little difference between the amount they take for a high and the amount that causes an overdose."
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