New educational programs are being launched with the aim of combating the increasing abuse of prescription opioid drugs among U.S. young adults.
One such program launched in Pennsylvania and Illinois, the Narcotics Overdose Prevention and Education program, or NOPE, offers middle school and high school students information about prescription painkillers.
The program is born out of concerns that such opiate drugs, which account for more than 71 percent of overdose deaths from prescription drugs, are increasingly being abused by young, suburban users.
Rather than more generalized anti-drug school programs of the past, NOPE and some similar programs are targeting painkillers, increasingly a narcotic choice among teenagers.
And rather than the scare tactics of programs in the 1980s and 1990s like Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign, the new programs seek to educate students on the science of addiction through presentation of studies and with interactive computer programs.
"Our program really is looking at adolescent brain development, addiction on a brain level," says Christopher Adzia, the program manager of an opioid-abuse prevention program at the Robert Crown Center for Health Education in Chicago.
In the U.S. prescription opioids caused more than 16,000 deaths across all age groups in 2013, a 50 percent increase from 3 years before, figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show.
Although encouraged by the birth of new programs, many experts express concern that they're in an uphill battle.
"The whole field is sort of in withdrawal," says William Hansen, who runs All Stars, a school drug-prevention provider in Greensboro, North Carolina.
An ongoing obstacle to drug education -- funding -- was made even worse in 2011 when moneys for the former Office of the Safe and Drug Free Schools and Communities, a major source of funding for school prevention programs, were severely reduced.
Still, the people behind NOPE are persevering.
In the program's hour-long presentations, instructors teach students the ways to recognize symptoms of drug overdose, with emphasis on quickly seeking and obtaining medical help for victims of an overdose.
They also cover the dangers of taking prescription painkiller drugs that have not been prescribed by a doctor.
The NOPE program is being closely watched by officials in some other states.
Legislators in New York, New Jersey and Wisconsin are proposing measures that would mandate programs to educate students on the dangers of opioid drugs in their states.
