Five students hospitalized after taking drugs
Five Panama City high school students were hospitalized Wednesday after some ingested as many as seven anti-depressant pills that one of the students allegedly brought to school and distributed, authorities said.
The Arnold High School students, three girls and two boys, are 10th- and 11th-graders and all took Elavil, an anti-depressant prescription drug, said Sgt. Marc Tochterman of the Bay County Sheriff’s Office. The problem was discovered after a student left a classroom to go to the restroom, then returned to the wrong room and was “very incoherent,” according to a Sheriff’s Office news release.
One of the girls went to Bay Medical Center and the rest of the students were taken to Gulf Coast Medical Center. The five students taken to Gulf Coast Medical Center were released by 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, according to Rod Whiting, the hospital’s marketing director.
The student at Bay Medical was listed in guarded condition Wednesday afternoon, Tochterman said. A sixth student who also took Elavil went home and called a hospital emergency room and was told to stay at home, he said.
The students all are minors and their names were not released by investigators.
As part of the investigation and to determine what treatment to give them, investigators had to confirm what prescription drug was ingested.
“We did a pill lineup where we put a bunch of different pills on a table and asked the students to identify the pill they took,” Tochterman said. “They picked the Elavil.”
He described the students as “like zombies.”
Elavil is a member of the group of drugs called tricyclic antidepressants used mainly to treat mental depression, but it also can be used to treat chronic pain. Symptoms of an Elavil overdose include irregular heartbeat, seizures, vomiting and coma, according to the National Institutes of Health.
Tochterman said the students claimed to have gotten the drugs from someone near the cafeteria after they got off the school bus in the morning. The student who handed out the pills obtained them from her home, investigators said.
"Criminal charges may be pending on the person who brought the pills to school,” Tochterman said.
The students also will face disciplinary action at school if it is proven they violated the district’s zero-tolerance drug policy.