Heroin's Hold: Police say some students in Iowa City, Cedar Rapids abusing opioid pills

IOWA CITY — In March, a 17-year-old student was stopped outside a high school parking lot in Iowa City. In the boy's backpack, police found five or six types of drugs, including marijuana, and mushrooms.

Officers then discovered in the car dozens of baby bottles filled with carefully measured quantities of cough syrup and Codeine — an opiate painkiller.

The mixture, Iowa City Police investigator Gabe Cook said, likely would have been added to a bottle of Sprite to make Lean or Purple Drank, a beverage that — with an added Jolly Rancher hard candy for flavor — looks like grape Gatorade and causes a dissociative effect.

Cook would not name the high school or the student involved because he has not yet been charged, pending lab results.

Abuse of opiate pills often is the first step toward heroin addiction. The high produced by an opiate pill is similar to a heroin high, as the drugs are chemically similar.

Opiate pills regularly are prescribed for pain management, and Cook said he suspects most of the opiates he finds in schools come from parents' medicine cabinets.

'If you are prescribed any opiates, you need to dispose all of them (when you no longer need them),' he said. 'If you truly need them again, you can go to a doctor and get them prescribed. Otherwise, the potential is there for them to be abused.'

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Students in Iowa City and Cedar Rapids also have been found sharing the drugs with each other. Cook said eight search warrants served on Iowa City students' cellphones showed discussion related to using prescription drugs.

'I was shocked when I was looking at these two phones and the kids were talking about drinking this (Purple Drank) at school,' he said.

Amphetamines such as Ritalin and Adderall also are being abused, but likely are being prescribed legally to students, then sold or traded, Cook said.

In Cedar Rapids, 88 people ages 11 to 18 have been charged with illegal possession of a prescription drug since 2009, according to public safety spokesman Greg Buelow. More than a quarter of those arrests — 28 of them — happened at a Cedar Rapids school.

Records from the Cedar Rapids police and the Cedar Rapids school district obtained by The Gazette document students abusing the prescription opioid pill hydrocodone, as well as Adderall and depressants such as Xanax and lorazepam.

In some cases, students are swiping the drugs from their parents' medicine cabinets and sharing them with friends.

That was the case last September at Jefferson High, when a social studies teacher noticed one of his students was 'clearly under the influence of something' and was acting 'like a stumbling drunk,' according to a district suspension report.

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The student was so disoriented that the teacher walked with the student to the clinic to keep the student from falling over in the hallway.

When they arrived, they found another student who had been sent to the clinic after being unable to write on the board in class. The first student eventually admitted to stealing six Xanax pills from a parent, bringing them to school and splitting them with the second student.

Cedar Rapids schools redacted the names of the students in the suspension reports, citing student-confidentiality laws.

Cedar Rapids police reports and district records show six incidents of prescription pill abuse among all three of the district's comprehensive high schools — Jefferson, Kennedy and Washington — since January 2015. Cedar Rapids police Sgt. Robert Collins, who oversees officers who are stationed in the high schools, said he believes there is more prescription drug abuse going on than they're able to catch.

'They know there's more of the usage than what the arrest stats are telling them,' Collins said. 'It's so easy to conceal. It's just a pill.'