Rehab centers across the country are starting to see a rapid increase in a surprising population: high school athletes.
Roughly one-quarter of the 7.5 million high school athletes in the U.S. suffer a sports-related injury every year. One study has shown that athletes who participate in high injury sports are 50% more likely to abuse prescription painkillers.
CBS News reports that many athletes who become addicted were prescribed painkillers for their injuries, but eventually moved on from pills to a cheaper alternative, heroin. At St. Christopher’s Inn in Garrison, N.Y., a homeless shelter known for running one of the state’s most successful rehab programs, nearly one-quarter of the residents are athletes.
“These medications mask the pain but do nothing to treat the injury,” David Gerber, director of St. Christopher’s Inn, told CBS News. “So it often worsens the injury, making the need for more medications, and they become addicted.”
Adolescent athletes are an especially vulnerable population. A 2013 study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health showed that 11% of high school athletes will have used pain medications for non-medical reasons by the time they reach their senior year. Those statistics increase even more when focusing on contact sports such as football and hockey.
“I just felt like I could do anything,” said 24-year-old Robert King, a former high school wrestler who was prescribed Percocet for a broken foot and eventually started using heroin. “I felt like I was invincible. Once I started taking pills I never really stopped.”
University of Michigan researcher Philip Todd Veliz also noted in the study that “male adolescent athletes who participated in competitive sports across the three-year study period had two times greater odds of being prescribed painkillers during the past year.” They also had “four times greater odds of medically misusing painkillers (i.e., using them to get high and using them too much) when compared to males who did not participate in competitive sports.”
Other recent studies have confirmed similar findings. A research project published in 2014 in the Journal of Child & Adolescent Substance Abuse found that high school athletes were generally more likely to use illegal substances than their peers who did not play sports.
After analyzing data from 2,300 high school seniors who participated in a 2009 survey, the study found that overall, male athletes were more likely to abuse drugs than female athletes, with 12% of boys admitting to abusing painkillers compared to 8% of girls. White students were the most common drug users, and illegal drug use was more common in football than in any other sport.