Teens Looking For New Highs `Huff' Propane -- Freon Also Joins Inhalants Sniffed `Just To Experiment'

It started out like any other Saturday night for the 15-year-old: lounging on the couch at a friend's town house, watching a movie with several classmates from school. Twice, according to one friend, she stepped outside for a "huff" and popped back in a couple of minutes later. The third time, she didn't come back.

"Jen's passed out!" someone yelled, and several teens rushed out, having heard a loud thump as if a body had hit the deck. There she lay in her blue jeans, peach shirt and blue Vans sneakers, unconscious, a propane tank hose by her side.

Jennifer Leigh Hoover, a sophomore at Lackey High School in Charles County, Md., died that night last fall of cardiac arrest after inhaling propane gas from an outdoor grill.

In search of a two-minute high, she added her name to a growing number of young, often middle-class teenagers who sniff the fumes from aerosol sprays, paint thinner, gasoline and other ordinary household products for cheap, and sometimes deadly, thrills.

"EPIDEMIC PROPORTIONS"

Sniffing has been around as long as model-airplane glue and gasoline pumps, but the last few years have witnessed what an article in the New England Journal of Medicine calls abuse "of epidemic proportions."

A survey of 51,000 eighth-grade and high-school students released yesterday showed that while use of hard drugs like heroin, cocaine and crack did not rise, significant increases were found in student use of "beginner" drugs such as marijuana and inhalants.

What most occupied the attention of the researchers at the University of Michigan, which has been carrying out the annual survey for 19 years, were the results among very young teens, eighth graders, 13 and 14 years old.

A little more than one of every 10 eighth graders in the survey inhaled glues, solvents and aerosols, the study showed. The number of 10th graders who used inhalants grew from 7.1 percent in 1991 to 8.4 percent last year. Seniors using inhalants went from 6.6 percent in 1991 to 7 percent last year.

"A LOT OF KIDS DO FREON"

Jennifer's parents, Nancy and Berk Hoover, didn't see the crash coming. They say they talked to Jenny several times about illegal drugs, especially after she started smoking an occasional cigarette.

"Oh Dad," she'd say to Berk, "I wouldn't do anything like that." She even joined the high-school chapter of Students Against Drugs.

"We never even thought there might be something right in the home," says Nancy. "After they're 10 years old and can read the labels, you don't talk about the stuff under the sink."

"I just don't understand it," Nancy continues, her eyes filling with tears.

Only Patrick Hoover, Jennifer's older brother, offers a clue: Jennifer was a curious sort. "She probably saw someone else do it and it didn't kill them, so she thought she'd just try it," he says.

According to several Lackey classmates, propane was only the latest in a number of gases some students had tried.

"A lot of kids do Freon," one boy said during lunch in the school cafeteria a couple of weeks after Jennifer died. "You put it in a plastic bag and breathe in. If you take a hit out of a can, it'll freeze your lungs."

"I've used propane a little," said another boy. "Also Freon, nitrous oxide . . . I did it just to experiment."

"Whippets" of nitrous oxide, manufactured for whipping-cream dispensers, can be purchased at retail stores and are passed around freely at many concerts and all-night dance parties.

Trent Tschirgi, assistant director of the office of substance-abuse studies at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy, says he was searching for a seltzer charger at a specialty store in his neighborhood mall when he spied six rows of nitrous-oxide bottles.

"Mostly it's teenagers who buy this stuff," a clerk told him. "They put it in a balloon at a party and snort it, and it doesn't hurt anybody."

HEARING PAC-MAN SOUNDS

Lauren Diedrich, who drove Jennifer Hoover to the town house that ill-fated night, said her friends get high on inhalants because "it's fun, like getting drunk or something." Jennifer told her she liked propane, because "it makes you laugh," said Lauren, who also said she'd never tried it. "I don't think she knew it could kill her."

Young people seek out inhalants because they feel they can control them, says Neil Rosenberg, founder of the International Institute for Inhalant Abuse: "They can sniff just enough and get high, or a lot and hallucinate."

Diedrich says Jennifer told her that when she inhaled propane, she'd see "checkers or polka dots." Another student says that after a prolonged whiff, the huffer hears "Pac-Man sounds . . . `Wah, wah, wah'. "

THE SYMPTOMS, THE DAMAGE

What's happening to those huffers, says Tschirgi of the University of Maryland, is that the chemicals are replacing oxygen in the blood, making the heart beat irregularly and altering breathing. Death can occur instantly (called "sudden sniffing death") the first time one huffs or the 50th, from cardiac arrhythmia, respiratory failure or as a result of a sudden release of adrenaline.

More than 60 U.S. youths died last year from sniffing, according to the inhalant-abuse institute.

Those who don't die can suffer serious damage. After six months of regular use, the brain, lungs, nerves, liver, kidneys and bones may be permanently damaged, according to the institute's Rosenberg, a neurologist who has examined dozens of brain scans of serious sniffers.

Abusers may mimic victims of Alzheimer's disease, suffering from "chronic memory problems (and) major difficulties with reading, writing and arithmetic," he says. In terms of coordination, "they look like a staggering drunk." They suffer vision problems and hearing difficulties, and it's not unusual to see abusers in their 20s wearing hearing aids.

Because the presence of inhalants is not picked up in the routine screening following a death, inhalant abuse "has gone largely unreported" in the United States, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine reported in December 1990.

"Our research . . . leads us to believe that abuse of these readily available inhalants has reached epidemic proportions," authors Earl Siegel and Suman Wason wrote, "indicating an urgent need for preventive efforts directed at teenagers and their parents, with an emphasis on the risk of sudden death from sniffing."

--------------------- INHALANTS EASY TO GET --------------------- We've all heard about children sniffing glue. But kids have been found to use plenty of easy-to-get and inexpensive inhalants, not least of which is propane gas. Some other examples:

Gasoline. Magic Markers. Paint thinner. Air freshener. Cigarette lighter fluid (butane). Freon (used in refrigeration). Nitrous Oxide.