Image-Conscious Teenagers Turn To Prescription Drugs

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. - His teenage escape did not come from a bottle of Jim Beam, a line of white powder or a needleful of liquid illusion.

On the night two months ago that Buddy Sanzeri, 15, wrapped a stolen red Mazda 323 around a tree in Lauderhill, Fla., his poison of choice, friends say, was a legal tranquilizer with an exotic name: Xanax.

Sanzeri died instantly from the injuries sustained in the Dec. 20 crash. His mother, Connie Sanzeri, is waiting for toxicology results that will show what he had in his bloodstream.

But she blames her son's recent dalliance with Xanax for turning a boy with a behavior problem into a 5-foot roiling volcano of violence.

"He had an anger problem to begin with," she said. "But when he was on Xanax, he just didn't care about anything."

Sanzeri was tapping into an emerging trend among misbehaving teens: prescription drugs to get a high and avoid the problems of illicit ones.

"A couple of years ago, acid seemed to be the thing, then roofies (rohypnol)," said Andrea Fulcher, substance-abuse counselor for Broward County, Fla., schools. "Lately, I've run across more kids who have experimented with pills. Xanax seems to come up frequently."

There is also the stimulant Ritalin, the depressant Valium, the muscle relaxant Lioresal and the painkillers Demerol, Percodan and Percocet.

Mostly white and middle-class

Prescription-abusing teenagers, who detectives say are mostly white and middle-class, see themselves as sidestepping the expense, the stigma and the perceived dangers of illegal drugs, such as cocaine and heroin.

"They're petrified of cocaine," Fulcher said, because they associate it with inner-city violence. But they see legal drugs as benign.

And there's no denying the availability. Detectives say they see advertisements for cheap knockoffs of unprescribed Xanax on the back pages of smut magazines.

But William Gordon, of the Lauderhill (Fla.) Police Department, said teenagers don't even have to step outside their homes to get it.

"Their parents or friends of their parents have a prescription," Gordon said. "Who's going to notice if there's one or two pills missing?"

Officials at Broward General Medical Center said they see cases of Xanax overdoses, but they have not noticed any recent increase. And drug counselors say Xanax and prescription pills will not unseat alcohol and marijuana as the drugs of choice among youths.

But they say Xanax use is gaining popularity in part because teenagers think it isn't habit-forming.

"There's a perception that they're not using needles and cocaine, so, well, they're not an addict," said Kimberly Stephens, admissions counselor at Spectrum, a drug-treatment center for youths in Broward County. "(They say,) `It's not like I'm a crackhead.' If it's not crack or heroin, it's OK."

For Connie Sanzeri, though, Xanax was anything but good medicine.

The drug is listed in the Physician's Desk Reference as a tranquilizer to treat panic disorder or anxiety. But the list of warnings and side effects associated with it runs longer than the description of its uses.

One of them involves patients with psychiatric conditions, who might get violent when they take the drug.

Psychiatrists had told Sanzeri that her son had an oppositional defiant disorder - hostility to adults and authority figures - that blocked his development. Buddy Sanzeri just called it "a fancy name for a bad kid."

His girlfriend, Krystle Ragusa, 17, said they both took Xanax for the first time in July. Each took two "bars," the street name for the brick-shaped pills. Ragusa had gotten them from a friend.

First, they slept for hours and hours in his room. But when his parents tried to wake them, Sanzeri went berserk, ripping out dresser drawers, hitting his mother and Ragusa, trashing his room.

Went on another binge

The week before he died, Sanzeri went on another binge. He took the two family cars and stranded them in mud while his mother was on a family trip and his father was at work.

He called his mother in New York and fell asleep, letting the phone go dead. Panicked, she had her husband call police and paramedics, who revived him. He started throwing things, threatened to kill his father and bit one of the paramedics.

The couple begged officers to institutionalize Sanzeri.

"We told them to arrest him, please," Connie Sanzeri said. "They asked him if he was going to harm himself. He was too smart for them. He told them no."

So they left him at home.

Ragusa said she saw Sanzeri the afternoon before he died, when he drove by the house where she was staying. She asked him what he was doing that night.

"He said, `I'm takin' bars,' " Ragusa said. "I told him to be careful."

The next day, Sanzeri stole the Mazda and was going 65 to 70 mph when the car hopped the curb on the median and slammed into a tree.

Two months later, Ragusa said friends still ask her at school if she wants bars.

"I just lost him, and they ask me," she said. "I tell them I don't do pills no more."