Parents, even those familiar with medical drug detox programs because of their own drug problems, are often the last to know that their teenage kids are abusing prescription drugs, and moving on to heroin and a life of crime.

Thousands of families move to the suburbs every year because they think it will be safer for their kids, but parents are learning too late these days that the suburbs can’t protect their kids from prescription drug addiction, and more tragically, death from prescription drug overdoses.

Even more frightening than the epidemic of prescription drug addiction is the rising toll of heroin addiction and overdose deaths among suburban teens and young adults, and the crime that usually follows drug addiction. The desperate need for ready cash to get heroin or other narcotics leads from petty theft to major crime, prison, and ruined young lives.

For example, in picturesque North Haven, Connecticut, where you’d least expect to find prescription drug addiction problems, 14 youths were arrested recently after a two-year crime wave involving a dozen robberies of homes and businesses, and more than 40 thefts from automobiles -- dating back to early 2006 -- just to fuel illicit prescription and street drug addictions.

Five years ago, the National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) annual report said heroin was just beginning to move into the suburbs, but found that the drug's popularity was stable or declining. But by 2008, the NDIC's National Drug Threat Assessment warned that heroin abuse "is increasing among young adults in a number of suburban and rural areas."

Kids begin experimenting with brand-name narcotic painkillers like OxyContin, Vicodin, Percocet or Lortab, or generic narcotics like hydrocodone or methadone. If these highly addictive and dangerous narcotics don’t kill them first, many kids rapidly become victims of prescription drug addiction. And parents are often the last to find out, usually by a call from a hospital emergency ward, or from the police who have their kid in custody, or worse, at the morgue.

In Massachusetts, for example, opiate-related deaths among kids as young as 13 was five times as great in 2006 as it was in 1997. And according to federal and state drug intelligence, law enforcement, and treatment officials, the trend is showing no signs of slowing down.

Obtaining prescription drugs on an ongoing basis is a problem for kids, which is also a big motivator to try the readily available, and cheaper, street heroin. Most teens steal the pills from parents and relatives who have legitimate prescriptions, and share with friends or sell them at school. When those become unavailable, kids look to the streets. And that’s where they find low-level heroin dealers moving in from the inner cities, who find the suburbs a lucrative, easily monopolized market, loaded with new customers with money in their pockets.

According to Allison Stombaugh, an intelligence analyst for the NDIC, "Prescription opiates are seen as acceptable because they are doctor prescribed. But abusing them to get high frequently leads users to try heroin." The CDIC’s 2009 report will cover the growing threat of prescription opiates because they lead to so much prescription drug addiction among kids, but they’re the major gateway to cheaper, highly refined heroin now flooding the streets of suburbia.

Teens that are lucky enough to get help for narcotic addiction need the same kind of treatment that any inner-city junky needs. Narcotic addiction is the same no matter where you are addicted. And withdrawing from narcotics is the first step in rehabilitation.

A medical drug detox program, the kind offering 24/7 medical supervision, and tailored to a patient’s unique metabolic and DNA requirements, offers by far the safest withdrawal from drugs or alcohol. And although clinics that accept teenagers are not as widely available as adult centers, they do exist. If your teenager or the child of someone you know is ready to handle a street drug or prescription drug addiction problem, call a medical drug detox center and get all your questions answered by a professional medical drug detox specialist.