WASHINGTON — Teenagers increasingly are getting high with legal drugs like painkillers and mood stimulants, and they’re turning to cough syrup as well, a government survey released yesterday said.

The annual study by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, conducted by the University of Michigan, showed mixed results in the nation’s longtime campaign against drug abuse by teenagers.

It found that while fewer teenagers overall drank alcohol or used illegal drugs in the last year, a small but growing number were popping prescription painkillers like OxyContin and Vicodin and stimulants like Ritalin.

As many as one in every 14 high school seniors said they used cold medicine “fairly recently” to get high, the study found.

It was the first year that the government tracked the frequency of teenagers who reported getting high from over-the-counter medicine for coughs and colds.

“It’s bad that kids are buying cough syrup and using it this way — it’s not good for them,” the director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, John Walters, said.

The study found about one in 10 high school seniors have abused the painkiller Vicodin, and Mr. Walters said kids may be pilfering the pills from their parents’ medicine cabinets.

“That is one thing you can do — take the pills that are no longer being used and throw them away, get rid of them,” he said in an interview.

Mr. Walters credited public service advertising with a steady decrease in teenage drug use over the past five years and said the agency would shift some of its 2007 advertising budget toward combating prescription drug abuse.

He challenged the recommendations of an August government audit that said the anti-drug advertising campaign wasn’t working and that suggested Congress consider reducing its funding. The report by the Government Accountability Office found some children were actually more likely to use marijuana after seeing the ads.