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viscosity Offline
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Posts: 2,346
Join Date: Feb 2006
Location: St. Louis
Default 06-29-2010, 05:51 PM

Quote:
Police arrested seven minors for taking cough medicine to get high after a 15-year-old boy overdosed and ended up in the hospital.

The teen was seizing when he arrived at the emergency room, police spokesman Sam Clemens said. He told officers he had been at an apartment in the 400 block of North Duluth Avenue with his friends and that he’d taken a handful of Coricidin pills.

The active ingredient in Coricidin that gets people high is dextromethorphan. It can create hallucinations if taken in large doses.

As officers interviewed the 15-year-old boy, a 14-year-old girl arrived at the hospital with the same symptoms. She’d begun to seize at the Kum and Go convenience store at 501 N. Minnesota Ave., Clemens said.

She’d taken Coricidin pills at the same party, authorities said.

Police found five others between the age of 14 and 15 who had taken the pills. One of the boys brought a bottle to the apartment early in the evening. No adults were there.

“They had all taken various amounts of this,” Clemens said.

Officers discovered the teens had each swallowed between five and 15 pills, so they were all taken to the hospital to be checked before being arrested for ingestion of an intoxicant.

Two of them were cited as runaways. One of the two was cited for false impersonation after giving officers a fake name.

Abuse of over-the-counter medication emerged in Sioux Falls about 10 years ago, according to Officer Hank Bayne.

He’s the school resource officer for Washington High School in Sioux Falls, and he remembers a student who had come to the nurse’s office with seizures after taking too much Coricidin - called “Triple C” at the time.

“We didn’t quite know what he was on and he wasn’t telling us at first,” Bayne said.

Over-the-counter drug abuse is more common among younger students, he said.

Older students are more likely to abuse prescription medications.

Students will drink bottles of Robitussin cough syrup to experiment because it’s readily available, he said.

“I don’t hear a lot about adults doing that,” he said. “Generally, your older people have moved on to other things.”

Teens may think the practice is safer than other drugs, he said, but there are real dangers to what’s known as “robotripping.”

The National Institute on Drug Abuse web site says the side effects of the overuse of cough medicine are similar to the side effects of harder drugs such as ketamine or PCP: Nausea, vomiting, loss of motor control and an increased heart rate.

On rare occasions, the combination of ingredients in the medicines can cut off oxygen to the brain and cause permanent damage.
Most stories about seizures from DXM seem to involve Coricidin, as the Chlorpheniramine maleate in Coricidin lowers the seizure threshold.

Although interestingly dextromethorphan may help treat epilepsy
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10702964


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