The alarming trend of adolescents taking to drugs, including sniffing petroleum products, cigarettes, alcohol and even smack, has caught up across all economic strata in the city, doctors dealing with such cases say.

At the PGI’s de-addiction centre, children as young as eight or nine years old come for treatment. Their parents, doctors say, complain they are addicted to substances like white fluids, kerosene and paint thinners.

The Drug De-addiction Centre at PGI sees around 500 cases from the region of which around 5 per cent are below 18 years old.

Doctors say curiosity and peer pressure are two leading factors leading adolescents to try these substances.

While children below the age of 14 generally take fluids, those between 14 and 18 years take to alcohol, cigarettes and smack, doctors say.

“We find children addicted to prescription drugs like proxyvon and spasmo-proxyvon, which are prescribed for stomach cramps,” a doctor at PGI says, adding that addictive drugs harm the child’s brain, and in the longer run, they can lead to severe complications like epilepsy.

Curiosity gets them ‘hooked’
Data collected at the PGI over 25 years (from 1978 to 2003) reveals the following:
* Results suggest that a combination of familial and social vulnerability factors, including ‘drug culture’ in the social milieu, lead children and adolescents to use addictive substances, which ‘develop’ with time.
* Mean age of first-time users of the primary substance is 14.8 years.
* The most common primary substance is opioids (76.2 per cent) and the most commonly used opioid is heroin (36.5 per cent).
* More than half of the subjects (54.2 per cent) were also nicotine dependent.
* The most common reason to start taking drugs is curiosity (78.8 per cent).