Prescription Drug Abuse Support Group

A prescription drug (or POM Prescription Only Medicine, in UK) is a licensed medicine that is regulated by legislation to require a prescription before it can be obtained. The term is used to distinguish it from over the counter drugs which can be obtained without a prescription. Different jurisdictions have different definitions of what constitutes a prescription drug. As a general rule, over the counter drugs are used to treat conditions not necessarily requiring a doctor's care and will have been proven to meet higher safety standards for self-medication by patients. Often a lower dosage of a drug will be approved for OTC use, while higher dosages will remain the province of a doctor's prescription; a notable case is ibuprofen, which has been widely available as an OTC pain killer since the mid-1980s but is still available in doses up to four times the OTC dose for use in cases of severe orthopedic pain.

A recent study reported that about one in five teenagers has abused a prescription painkiller — more than those who have experimented with either ecstasy, cocaine, crack or LSD. The most popular prescription drug abused by teens was Vicodin, a pain-killer, with 18 percent (about 4.3 million youths) reporting. OxyContin, as well as drugs for attention-deficit disorder like Ritalin or Adderall, came in second place with 10 percent. One in eleven teens (2.2 million) had abused over-the-counter products such as cough medicine. Fewer than half the teens in the study (48 percent) believed experimenting with prescription drugs was a "great risk." Additionally, many teens chose to use legal drugs because of "ease of access."