Prescription Drug Addiction

The non-medical use or abuse of prescription drugs is a serious and growing public health problem in this country. Most alarming is the fact that the 2004 National Institute on Drug Abuse's (NIDA's) Monitoring the Future survey of 8th, 10th, and 12th-graders found that 9.3 percent of 12th graders reported using Vicodin without a prescription in the past year, and 5.0 percent reported using OxyContin, making these medications among the most commonly abused drugs by adolescents and young adults.

The abuse of certain prescription drugs; opiates, depressants, and stimulants, can lead to addiction in certain individuals. Oftentimes the drugs are obtained from our homes or purchased easily over the Internet. The majority of applicants for admission to San Cristobal Academy have experimented, at minimum, with the non-medical use of prescription drugs, and it's not unusual to find habits costing hundreds of dollars on a weekly basis.

Prescription medication addiction is a huge problem and getting more serious all the time. Additionally, many of our students have graduated from the use of other drugs and now consume lethal combinations or cocktails. They spend their days trying to figure out how to wake up and feel good; then find other drugs to bring them down, allowing for sleep. The long-term health implications are enormous and often life threatening. It wasn't all that long ago when most treatment programs were focused mostly on alcohol addiction but today the trend requires treatment centers to deal with far more complex and deep-seated addictions involving serious physical, psychological, and social complications that make recovery more challenging.

With some SCA students, their addiction story started with prescribed medications for Attention Deficit Disorder, Anxiety Disorder, or Oppositional Defiance Disorder. Abusing may have started in early teens and grew over time to include other illegal substances. For others, prescription medications came later to help manage the symptoms of illegal substances. No matter the order or the reason, addiction is becoming increasingly complex and difficult to treat.

The prescription drug addiction treatment program at San Cristobal Academy is designed for complicated cases involving the full spectrum of issues often found with young men dealing with emotional-behavioral problems and addiction. Full recovery requires an integrated treatment approach involving 12-step work, therapy, life skills, family programming, and developing new ways of having fun without the use of addictive substances. Students work on completing high school and/or beginning or continuing college. San Cristobal Academy is recognized throughout the industry for it's utilization of time-tested methodologies and evidence based approaches to treatment.

To learn more about San Cristobal's chemical dependency treatment program; please call their Admissions office at 888-449-7706.