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GREENSBORO — Will Guest has heard it all.

He’s 28, an amiable Midwesterner with gel-spiked hair and a small gold loop through his left ear. He runs The Insight Program, which helps local teenagers and young adults overcome drug and alcohol addiction.

So, he knows about Pharm Parties. It’s when teenagers get together, dump someone’s prescription meds into a bowl and start popping them into their mouths like candy corn to get that rush.

He also knows his own dance with addiction.

He was a good student, a star on the football team who dated the homecoming queen. He had planned to play football at the University of Kansas. But his addictions got him arrested and kicked out of his house and his high school.

He first smoked marijuana, then drank alcohol, downed pills and snorted cocaine. It started when he was 13.

Today, he’s trained and 10 years sober. He works with clients from 13 to 23, and he often shares his story when someone starts making some sort of concession like, “I’ve stopped getting high, but I smoke weed now and again.”

These days, Guest hears a lot about abusing pills. It’s the nation’s new epidemic.

According to folks who know, nearly one in five teens has tried prescription medication to get high. That’s 19 percent — or 4.5 million teens — who’ve downed Ritalin or Adderall, Vicodin or OxyContin.

That information, plucked from a 2006 survey, comes from the Partnership for a Drug Free America.

Listen to Guest and you realize the new pusher in town could be your very own medicine cabinet. The drugs are easy to get and even easier to conceal. Guest’s young clients tell him they take pills for all kinds of reasons: to deal with school or a breakup, the need to communicate or fit in.

But mostly, they just want to see what happens when they dabble with pills named R-Ball, Skippy and Hillbilly Heroin.

Some kick their habit. Some don’t. Guest knows them all.

Here’s one. Let’s call him Alex.

Alex was 18, a Guilford County high school student addicted to the painkiller OxyContin. He was doing well, talking frankly in Guest’s support group or in Guest’s office, sitting across from him in a cushy chair.

But when Alex got out of Insight’s treatment program, he relapsed and started using again. Alex later died. He had taken too much OxyContin.

“It sucked,’’ says Guest, his voice rising. “But it could have been any one of them. There are 60 kids in the support group, and it could have been any one of them.’’

On Thursday night, Guest will join a school resource officer, a pharmacist and an emergency room doctor at a forum put together by two groups on the front lines: Alcohol and Drug Services and the Guilford County Substance Abuse Coalition.

They’ll talk about the need for education to unravel the denial they see most everywhere. They’ll also share their own personal stories.

Like the one about Alex.

“Kids are so much in denial,’’ Guest says. “But instead of waiting until they’re 30 and hitting the bottom, parents can be the loving, logical force in their lives. Everything comes down to the love of the parents. That’s huge.’’

That happened to Guest. After eight weeks in a treatment program in Arizona, after seven months of getting his head straight, Guest came home to make amends with his parents. It happened over dinner. It’s a conversation Guest will always remember.

“That was the hardest thing we ever did,’’ Guest’s mom, an emergency room nurse, told her son about kicking him out of the house. “But I’m glad we did it.’’

“You saved my life,’’ Guest responded.

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com.