Inhalant abuse increasing among U.S. teens

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Over one million American teenagers intentionally inhale the vapors of common household products like hairspray, shoe polish and glue each year and the number is rising, government officials said on Thursday.

Kicking off a week of activities designed to alert parents and children to the dangers posed by inhalants, White House drug czar John Walters said recent trends were unacceptable.

“As drug use overall has gone down in this country, we have had an increase in inhalant use,” Walters said.

Inhalants commonly sniffed, or “huffed,” by children as young as eight include gasoline and lighter fluid, spray paints, cleaning fluids, paint thinners and other solvents, degreasers, correction fluids, hair sprays and odorizers.

“These substances are everywhere in our lives. We have almost 23 million people who have abused inhalants in their lifetimes. The problem is pervasive,” said Westley Clark, director of the center for substance abuse at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Jessie, a 17-year-old from Indianapolis, said she became hooked by sniffing the helium used to fill balloons for weddings and parties.

“They told me, stay away from cocaine, stay away from heroin. They never said stay away from inhalants,” she said at a news conference with Walters.

Jeanette Smith, whose 17-year-old son, Jimmy, died last year after inhaling butane, said, “He didn’t know it could kill him and we didn’t know he was huffing.”

More than 2 million people said they huffed in 2003, of whom 1.1 million were aged 12 to 17, said Harvey Weiss, executive director of the National Inhalant Prevention Society, citing results from the 2002 and 2003 national survey on drug use and health.

In 2002, over a million people huffed for the first time, of which 833,000 were aged 12 to 17.

The health effects can include brain and neural damage, convulsions, deafness, impaired vision, depressed motor skills and death. The social effects, surveys show, include behavioral problems, other drug use and delinquent behavior.

Stephen Pasierb, president of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, said survey data showed awareness of the dangers of inhalant use had fallen significantly among young people and that parents were failing to educate their children about the dangers. 

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