Prescription opioid misuse among high schoolers is at its lowest point since the National Institute on Drug Abuse began measuring that statistic, according to the agency's Monitoring the Future survey.
The survey questions nearly 44,000 eighth, 10th and 12th graders on their behaviors and attitudes toward drugs. The survey has been conducted annually since 1975.
"The patterns of drug use, with respect to the opioid prescriptions, are basically opposite of what we're seeing in the adult population," NIDA director Dr. Nora Volkow said. "While initially at the beginning of 2003 and 2004, we were seeing very, very high rates of abusing teenagers. Those have been going down."
The NIDA said Vicodin is the most misused prescription narcotic among teenagers. In 2017, 4.2 percent of high school seniors reported misusing the drug, which is less than half of percentage of high school seniors who reported misusing Vicodin in 2004.
Although less than four percent of people who misuse pain relievers switch to heroin, the NIDA reports that nearly 80 percent of heroin users first misused prescription pain pills.
Health leaders say high school students are not making that transition. The Monitoring the Future survey found that heroin use did not significantly change in 2017, and less than half of one percent of high school students reported using heroin in the last year.
In Knox County, the annual Youth Risk Behavior Survey overlaps some of the areas covered in NIDA's Monitoring the Future survey. Because the surveys use different methods and ask different questions, it's difficult to directly compare Knox County data to the national data, but trends from both survey indicate progress on the opioid front.
"We've also seen in our survey too that the numbers are staying very low for heroin use," Metro Drug Coalition executive director Karen Pershing said. "We were concerned about that too because we have seen that shift in the adult population, that people have shifted from prescribed opioids to heroin, but we are not seeing that with our young people."
Another federal survey found that many teenagers get their hands on opioid prescriptions from friends who have stolen them from relatives or bathroom cabinets.
Volkow says efforts to make prescription pain pills harder to access are helping bring the number teenager abusing pills down.
The Monitoring the Future survey found among high school seniors this year, nearly 20 percent fewer students say it's easy to access Vicodin than in 2010.
"Prevention is key, so it is going to pay off in the long run," Pershing said. "So the more we se those youth numbers go down, the more we can delay the onset of any type of use of substances, the better off we're all going to be later on down the road."
More information on the results of the Monitoring the Future survey can be found here.
Click here for information on the survey's purpose and design.