Oz teens turning to parents' pills for 'easy high'

Melbourne, Sept 14 : Nearly one in four Aussie teenagers is raiding his or her parents' medicine cabinets for prescription drugs to get an 'easy high'.

The new trend has been dubbed "pharming".

A new research has revealed that youths aged 12 to 17 are most likely to take medications recreationally because they are cheaper, easier to obtain and mistakenly believed to be 'safe'.

In a risky bid to maximise a "hit", youngsters are crushing cocktails of pills and snorting the powder, mixing them with alcohol or even injecting.

In a new research, which involved 2813 young Australians, researchers said the "most concerning" finding was that 23.5 per cent of 12 to 25-year-olds took prescription drugs recreationally.

Paul Dillon of Drug and Alcohol Research and Training Australia said young people commonly believed if a drug came from a doctor it was safe.

"We live in a pharmaceutical world where there's a drug for everything, so we are creating a generation of users," News.com.au quoted him, as saying.

ANI