Fewer Warren County teens get their hands on prescription drugs through their parents’ medicine cabinets than did in 2014, but they are ordering them from offshore internet pharmacies.

The Save Our Kids Coalition conducts drug and alcohol use questionnaires of all public school children from sixth through 12th grades in both the Bowling Green and Warren County school districts. Of all the kids surveyed who admitted using prescription drugs for nonmedical purposes in 2014, only one child reported obtaining drugs from the internet. In 2015, that number jumped to 188, a mind-boggling increase of 18,700 percent.

The numbers seem to show that local efforts – such as drug take-back bins at the Bowling Green Police Department headquarters, the Warren County Sheriff’s Office and Kentucky State Police Post 3 – are limiting access to prescription drugs by providing a safe place for people to dispose of unwanted medicine. However, the huge increase in prescription drugs sold to local teens through internet pharmacies stirs concerns for Dr. Eric Gregory, executive director of the Save Our Kids Coalition.

“We’ve known online pharmacies existed, but it’s the first time we’ve seen this shift in youth sourcing through these” vendors, he said.

The coalition conducts drug-use surveys once a year as part of its mission to keep alcohol and drugs away from Warren County children. This staggering increase in the purchase of prescription drugs online surprised Gregory and hasn’t been on the radar of narcotics officers.

“I have not heard of much of a spike in obtaining prescription drugs on the internet,” Kentucky Office of Drug Control Policy executive director Van Ingram said. “I had heard of spikes in getting synthetics off of the internet. As far as prescription painkillers, I’ve not been made aware of that with adolescents over the internet.”

Ingram cautions that obtaining prescription drugs in this manner is both illegal and unsafe, because anyone with the capability of making pills can make a substance that looks like the pill a person believes he or she is ordering, but in fact is another substance entirely.

“People are often not getting what they think they are getting from offshore pharmacies,” Ingram said. “If it’s a person with a pill press and some rudimentary knowledge of chemistry, there is not quality control in that industry. You are getting what you get. This week’s batch may not be the same as last week’s.”

Nationwide, narcotics officers are seeing fentanyl, an extremely potent painkiller, being pressed into a substance that looks like Percocet and sold as Percocet to unsuspecting buyers. Percocet is also an opiate painkiller. But fentanyl is much more potent. Typically this type of pill manufacturing is occurring in China and Mexico and being shipped here and sold on the streets. For buyers with enough cash, pill presses are available for sale on legitimate websites, complete with casts that can make any substance placed into the press look like the real deal.

Pills peddled and purchased on the web or on the streets can be anything – the end user can never be certain what he or she is ingesting.

The best defense for parents worried about online access to drugs is to pay attention to their children’s online activity, Gregory said.

“Our kids are more interconnected,” he said. “They are much more comfortable in this virtual world than we are. I don’t think it’s a big a step for them to source their stuff online because they’re used to interacting more electronically anyway. I think that’s part of it. I think some adults would have more reservations about it.

“We know there are electronic pharmacies out there, especially in other countries, that are willing to ship drugs to the United States and they do it discretely. Customs can’t catch everything. With electronic forms of payment such as PayPal or Bitcoin, it’s very easy for kids to take that chance and source their stuff online.”

He suggests parents talk to their children openly about the dangers of drug use and to become familiar with all of the varieties of online communication so that parents can chat with their kids in the manner kids are accustomed to whether it’s texting, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat or any of the other myriad ways in which their children use to communicate.

“I understand giving your child some privacy but you’ve got to be in the know,” Gregory said. “You’ve to be a little nosy.

“Parents have got to get in there and have got to root this stuff out. They have to parent. It’s no different really than 25 years ago a kid going out on Friday night and Mom saying, ‘Where are you going, who is going to be there, what are going to do?” he said.

Ingram agrees that safety starts in the home.

“There’s not much local law enforcement can do about” internet pharmacies, he said. “I know the DEA works all over the world trying to shut these things down, but it’s a big world.”

— Follow Assistant City Editor Deborah Highland on Twitter @BGDNCrimebeat or visit bgdailynews.com.