Many teenagers suffer from anxiety, depression, unrest and overall unhappiness due to a number of external factors. Parental, academic and peer pressures often combine and lead individual teens to take drastic measures to escape from all the real life hurdles. Amongst the various substances that can be used for the purpose of getting high, medicinal abuse is probably the easiest to get away with. Unlike alcohol, marijuana, or other drugs, prescription and over the counter medication abuse is easier to come by.

 
Studies and research already indicate that prescription and over the counter medicines is a serious problem amongst teens. Roughly speaking, one out of every three teens knows someone who has uses OTC medication to get high. Teens also seem to believe that it is less dangerous than illegal drugs and hence do not usually hesitate in taking such drugs in large dollops. However, the misuse of these specific medicated substances amongst teenagers leads in more health issues than they realize.
 
By taking in ingredients like DXM (dextromethorphan) in large doses, which is meant for cough relief, teens end up getting a certain fix and hence high. This potentially means that some teens may even end up taking in many bottles of OTC cough medicines in one sitting.
 
Some of the harm that can be caused by this method of getting high is that the individual can suffer from color and sound distortions, hallucinations and motor control. High doses of various OTC medicines (not just the ones meant for cough relief) can lead to permanent damage such as fatal liver injury, cardiovascular effects, and over-sedation.
 
If you happen to be worried that your teen is part of this sort of behavior, then there would be some warning signs or strange behaviors that should alert you. These include ordering of medications online, so if your teen has been visiting various online pharmacies or buying random medicines through mail order than you should look into it. Other not so obvious signs include missing medicine from home cabinets, empty medicine bottles n your child’s room and a constant complaint of being ill when all seems fine. Other than that, teens who end up abusing OTC medications suffer in the same manner that teens who abuse other substances do. Their groups of friends change, their physical appearance begins to suffer and weaken and they also suffer from chronic and distressing mood swings.
 
In order to tackle this problem, a parent has to be extra vigilant. Simply looking for joints or beer bottles won’t indicate something gone wrong in your teen’s life. All strange behavior must be paid attention to and then investigated. Of course, at times your child really may have needed some cough meds and pouncing on them will only irritate them. In order to make sure they stay away from such methods of abuse, one needs to talk to them and teach them that medicine abuse is essentially no different from any other substance or drug abuse and is equally harmful.