POCATELLO (AP) — An 18-year-old man with less than six months with worth of dust on his high school diploma runs out of a house where underage kids are having a party. The man does a somersault and rolls in the December snow.

Witnesses would later describe the man's behavior as "unruly" to investigators with the Pocatello Police Department.

The man, who wants to be a police officer, goes inside the house where partygoers try to calm him. Eventually he passes out on a futon. While he is asleep, someone at the party uses the man's cell phone to call a friend to pick him up and take him somewhere to sleep it off.

After an altercation involving a fall down some stairs and blows to the friend who came to get him, the man was carried to a car and taken to an apartment to spend the night on a couch.

He was found dead there the next day.

After an autopsy and a toxicology report, the death was ruled an accidental overdose caused by the ingestion of OxyContin and alcohol.

This incident happened in 2004, which is about the time officials with local law enforcement agencies say the nationwide problem of prescription drug abuse began to take hold in the hallways, cafeterias and classrooms of local high schools.

Since then, the problem has only worsened. Kids are turning up in local emergency rooms comatose, overdosed on a near lethal concoction of prescription medications after attending a "pharm party," or just popping pills at school, or with a small group of friends.

As described by local law enforcement agents and health care professionals, a pharm party draws juveniles who bring a handful of random prescription medications pilfered from parents or bought off the street. The pills are all combined in a bowl that is then passed around to the guests like a dish of Halloween candy for them to fish out a mixed handful to wash down with their drink of choice, alcoholic or not.

Dr. Randall Fowler finishes donning scrubs in preparation for his shift in the Portneuf Medical Center's West Campus emergency room.

The local high schools finished their commencement ceremonies a week ago wrapping up the 2008-2009 school year, which Fowler said produced more prescription drug overdoses in high school-aged patients than he ever has witnessed.

"It's like Russian roulette because when you are pawing through a bowl full of different pills, capsules and tablets you're not sure what medication you're going to get," Fowler said. "Whether it is something that you maybe have an allergy to, either a known allergy or an unknown allergy, you don't know what the side effects are. You don't know what the prescription was meant to treat, and especially if you bind it with alcohol or other drugs it can be lethal."

Fowler estimates that in recent months at least six serious overdoses have come into the emergency room — all people in their teens or early 20s.

"Now, we're seeing a lot more intentional misuse of prescription medication. The most common being the narcotic class, the Vicodin, hydrocodone, Lortab, occasionally methadone, morphine, and Fentanyl," Fowler said.

Howard Manwaring, a former Bannock County sheriff's deputy, travels the United States educating about drug abuse and violence.

"We've found that nearly everywhere we've gone, prescription drug abuse is the hotbed," Manwaring said.

Pocatello Police Sgt. Mo Canfield is in charge of community services, which means he oversees all the department's school resource officers. He and his staff have been battling the nationwide trend of juveniles experimenting with prescription drugs as it has turned up in all of the Pocatello high schools gaining in popularity, especially over the past school year.

Canfield said pharm parties are just one part of the problem. What he and his officers are fighting, along with School District 25 officials and the juvenile court system, is the sale, distribution and use of prescription drugs on school property. Sometimes right in the classroom.

"I would say that most likely it's in all the high schools," said Jim Harrell, director of student support services for School District 25. "There is no doubt about that. It's there."

School Resource Officer Forest Peck is assigned to Pocatello High School and minces no words on prescription drug abuse among the students he watches over.

"It's huge right now," Peck said.

Peck estimated he has had no less than 30 serious cases involving prescription pills at his school during the past year.

Bannock County Sheriff Lorin Nielsen is seeing the same problem in the county at large and at Marsh Valley High School where he has a school resource officer stationed.

"We have found that it doesn't make a difference between rural or urban. It seems that these prescription painkillers have really popped up in the last two or three years to where we're seeing more and more kids selling and using prescription drugs because they are easier to obtain," Nielsen said. "We had one kid that took some hydrocodone and we had to have an ambulance come down and pick him up at Marsh Valley."

Jim Harrell, director of student support services for School District 25, said the district works closely with the Pocatello Police Department to monitor the kids while they are at school, but the best way to stop this problem is to educate parents, because most times they are unknowingly supplying their kids with the drugs that get them busted.

Peck, the school resource officer, said a number of the cases involving prescription drugs in the schools stem from non-users trying to make a quick buck. He said kids will come to school with four or five pills they took from a parent's bottle with the intention of selling them just to get $20 to cover a date.

"That's happened a lot this year, and that really breaks my heart," Peck said. "The law says if you are 14 years of age or older and you're caught selling drugs on or near school then you're charged as an adult with the felony charge of delivery of a controlled substance on school property. Before you know it, they are labeled as a drug dealer, and they don't think in those lines."