Teenage Drug Use Drops as Drinking and Smoking Hit All-Time Lows

[poledriver]

Teenage Drug Use Drops as Drinking and Smoking Hit All-Time Lows

The lure of drugs and binge drinking has loosened its grip on American teenagers, with the number regularly using illegal substances plummeting from records posted in the 1990s.

Alcohol use and cigarette smoking are at the lowest levels since 1975, the year that a survey involving more than 40,000 students in the eighth, 10th and 12th grades began. Demand for synthetic marijuana, often called Spice and widely sold in gas stations and convenience stores in some states, fell the most among illegal drugs, the University of Michigan study found.

The declines may reflect cultural changes among teenagers as more say they disapprove of binge drinking and believe that smoking carries a serious health risk, according to Michigan’s Monitoring the Future study. Public-health measures that are making it more difficult to get access to the illegal substances also may play a role, the investigators said.

“With the rates of many drugs decreasing, and the rates of marijuana use appearing to level off, it is possible that prevention efforts are having an effect,” said Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which funded the work. She urged parents, teachers and health-care providers to continue discussing the damage caused by drug use in teenagers, whose brains are still developing.

Room for Improvement

There is still plenty to accomplish, the researchers said. About one in six high-school seniors and 8.7 percent of eighth graders said they used electronic cigarettes, the first time the survey asked about the increasingly popular devices. While most high-school students said they disapproved of occasional marijuana smoking, only 16 percent said it put users at great risk, a drop from 27 percent five years ago.

Alcohol use dropped to 41 percent among all three grades in 2014, down from 43 percent a year earlier and well below the 61 percent reported in 1997. One in five high-school seniors reported binge drinking, or having five or more drinks in a row, within the previous two weeks, which is still a problem despite a drop from previous years, the researchers said.

Cigarette smoking fell to the single digits, with 8 percent of students saying they smoked in the previous month. That was down from a peak of 28 percent in 1997.

“The importance of this major decline in smoking for the health and longevity of this generation of young people cannot be overstated,” said Lloyd Johnston, the lead investigator from the University of Michigan.

Johnston warned against taking the news too much to heart.

“When things are much improved is when the country is most likely to take its eye off the ball, as happened in the early 1990s, and fail to deter the incoming generation of young people from using drugs, including new drugs that inevitably come along,” he said.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-...s-drinking-and-smoking-hit-all-time-lows.html

 

[Crankinit]

I'd imagine this has far less to do with any kind of concerted effort to reduce substance use, and far more to do with the internet, electronic devices and social media providing a huge variety of ways for people in this age group to entertain themselves (as well as form connections - of a sort - and a sense of identity and group belonging) without sneaking a bottle of vodka and getting smashed together. Pretty sure I would have started using drugs much earlier out of sheer boredom if I'd been stuck with 80's/90's level technology.

 

[slimvictor]

I hope that tobacco and alcohol use falls dramatically, so this is a good thing.
Children should never use drugs, even those that are less sinister, such as weed.
And the synthetic cannabinoids should never, ever be used by anyone without much more research.
Even though I was smoking weed from age 16, I hope that others don't do so - it is much better to wait until you are 21 or even a few years older, and your brain is fully developed.
Also, what crankinit said about technology might be true. Less boredom = less drug use.

 

[Nom de Plume]

I'd imagine this has far less to do with any kind of concerted effort to reduce substance use, and far more to do with the internet, electronic devices and social media providing a huge variety of ways for people in this age group to entertain themselves (as well as form connections - of a sort - and a sense of identity and group belonging) without sneaking a bottle of vodka and getting smashed together. Pretty sure I would have started using drugs much earlier out of sheer boredom if I'd been stuck with 80's/90's level technology.

I concur. But there seems other factors here. You're looking in the right place, bur you've missed the important niceties.

Conformity is, it certainly seems, a factor here, too. Indeed, peer pressure and normative social influence have existed since homo sapiens (or some evolutionary progenitor; I'm not sure if it was our species or one of our near ancestors) attained behavioral modernity, some 250,000 to 50,000 years heretofore.

But the 'net—especially that loathesome hydra I know and despise as social media (I fervently wish I had an atom bomb every time I hear mention of hashtag, like, follow, or tweet)—coupled with our ever-puissant, ever-ubiquitous, ever--persuasive mass media, has amplified, intensified, and globalized homo sapiens' previously mild propensity to conform and reform social outliers (via manifold techniques, from persuasion to penalization to genocide).

These evolved mechanisms—which every mammal I know of has—are not capable of keeping every ne'er-do-well, anomoly, or social deviant in order, of course. But mass media—in the form of an omnipresent, authoritative, device—is and is able to transmogrify human culture (with its inherent shortcomings, parochial influence, and vagaries) into a far-reaching, highly-watched, and internationally-emulated media culture.

Media culture inculcates homogeneity, desiccates diversity, (and no, diversity is not when your neighbor is some tattooed black lesbian hipster with pink hair or your bff is a Muslim named Sayyid al-Dahbi), quashes creativity, and obliterates originality.

That is to say, newer generations partake lesser in proscribed drugs because newer generations' beliefs are inculcated in them by mass media. And mass media incessantly preaches the unalloyed evil that is non-government endorsed recreational drugs. The only expection is cannabis. But I'll bet you an ounce of Quaaludes you'll never hear of a solemn, non-facetious mainstream news segment on the salubrious properties of moderate cocaine consumption.

To put it succinctly, nobody takes drugs as much for the same reason everybody listens to contemporary rap music, enunciates their language with a quasi-laryngealization phonation (i.e., creaky voice), etc. Its because it's the thing to do. And, to recapitulate what I said previously, the thing to do originates from mass media.

 

[Nom de Plume]

I hope that tobacco and alcohol use falls dramatically, so this is a good thing.

Tobacco? Meh. I never did get the appeal of cigarettes. I've smoked a whole pack of Marlboro 100's over the course of about a fortnight. Upon the completion of them each I was sprawled about the floor, queasy, and accompanied by vertigo and an aweful headache. I was curious and thougt after 2 or 3 of the bastards, I'd have hardened my breathers enough to smoke salvia out of a pipe without gagging up a piece of lung. But no such luck.

I must say, however, if alcohol falls out of favor (which it never will; heck, even the Sumerians were getting soused back in 4000 BCE, and the advent of agriculture was never too far away from the discovery of ethanol and thence dipsomania, no matter the culture), it may then become illegal. This is unacceptable and upsetting because it would represent a case wherein revelers and intemperate winebibbers destroy a good, medicinal drug with their loose amd conspicuous abuse. What of those tipplers—myself amongst them—who drink for medical ailmemts (debilitating anxiety, maddening chronic insomnia, over-inhibitedness, stress, and so forth)? Shall we suffer with careless doctors and their useless 'scripts of ordure just' cas some low IQ troglodyte can't handle his sauce without making a scene or killing someone in a car wreck? Drivel. Risible drivel

Children should never use drugs, even those that are less sinister, such as weed.
And the synthetic cannabinoids should never, ever be used by anyone without much more research.
Even though I was smoking weed from age 16, I hope that others don't do so - it is much better to wait until you are 21[...]

The age 21 is just a number Ronald Reagan pulled out from his malodorous ass back in the 1980s to fix the issue with different states having different drinking ages and the lack of a federal law on the matter. It matters fuck all. The scientific concensus seems to be 15-18.

 

[Crankinit]

who drink for medical ailmemts (debilitating anxiety, maddening chronic insomnia, over-inhibitedness, stress, and so forth)?

Get a script for valium?

 

[silas GUY]

this is BS says the guy who funds the prevention program and wants to obtain another round of yearly grants !

 

[falsifiedhypothesi]

these numbers are probably higher since I know I sure as hell didn't check off the "are you a drug user" box in any of the surveys I took in high school and I'm willing to bet I'm not the only one.

 

[Nom de Plume]

Get a script for valium?

The whole reason I think alcohol should remain legal to consume is because, IMO, doctors are unnecessarily circumspect when prescribing potentially recreational psychotropics, like valium.
(But they practically force antipsychotics and antidepressants down your esophagus. Yay! At least you cant abuse it, Dr. Cunt can't lose his licence, and the featherbrained, venal, asshat gwts a sizeable kickback)

I'm currently prescribed 1 mg clonazepam (as I have been for 1.25 years, because prescribers treat me like a drug-craving addict when I ask for a higher dose) and 10 mg zolpidem.
The zolpidem lost its efficacy only a few days afterward. All my zolpidem is nkw gone in 5 days, just so I can sleep!

I scheduled an appointment with the cunt, tout de suite.

I was kind, cordial, and I have no history of drug abuse. I'm well-educated, well-dress, and well-mannered like always in public.

Yet, I was outright denied. The cunt's suggestion: one SSRI for the agoraphobia and so-bad-I-can-talk-to-a-girl anxiety, and an antihistamine for aleep. I pleaded with him. I reminded him of how I had been taking antihistamines and SSRIs for years and I disliked the adverse effects and the horrendous, heroin-esque withdrawal from the SSRI.

I mentioned that the only thing I have hitherto found effective for my debilitating social anxiety and severe insomnia—after 12 years of being given inefficient and deleterious drugs—have been benzodiazepines, barbiturates, nonbenzodiazepines, etc.

The cunt could not care less. My options he proffered were essentially to be a limp-dicked, anhedonic, suicidal, overweight nonhuman or to remain with what I currently have and have had for over a year.

So, I have decided that, seeing as how doctors care more for their medical license and appeasing the DEA than helping a desperate patient, they can all get cancer and fuck off.

I will drink 'til i get cirrhosis and die vomiting blood. I dont care anymore. No doctor will help me and the only way to help myself is to use my education in chemistry and risk a felony.

And I tried that useless CBT cowplop from 17 yrs old to 19 yrs old—up' til last year. It doesn't motherfucking work!

 

[Hiltoniano]

^cbt actually is pretty effective for some. And I have had the exact same bullshit at the doctors office when I asked to switch up my adderall script to Dexedrine. He said he could take me off the adderal entirly if it was making me Mildy jittery and upset my stomach some ( due to levo amphetamine content of adderall). So I feel you. But some docs are liberal and understanding. Not many though. And tbph I also lied in high school about my drug use. I put some but not even 1/10 of my real and quite excessive usage of various intoxicants and euphoriants. Ohh those days were fun. And stupid. And fun

 

[Nom de Plume]

^cbt actually is pretty effective for some. And I have had the exact same bullshit at the doctors office when I asked to switch up my adderall script to Dexedrine. He said he could take me off the adderal entirly if it was making me Mildy jittery and upset my stomach some ( due to levo amphetamine content of adderall). So I feel you. But some docs are liberal and understanding. Not many though. And tbph I also lied in high school about my drug use. I put some but not even 1/10 of my real and quite excessive usage of various intoxicants and euphoriants. Ohh those days were fun. And stupid. And fun

MDs are only as liberal (what ever that means) and understanding as the legal regulations they operate within permit them to be. I say to hell with prescribers and their careless attitude toward the very raison d'être the over-paid, bought-out twats exist: to benefit the patient with any available and FDA-approved treatment whatever. Yet, the avaricious bastards' heads are apparently lodged too far up the pharmaceutical companies's shitters and enslaved by their billions that they're incapable of seeing the whole reason they became doctors in the first place.

So, I suggest anyoone afflicted with an illness with off-limits treatments not squander their time with consulting these supercilious fucktards, and instead invest that time in an autodidactic education in organic chemistry. Then synthesize your own anxiolytics, analgesics, soporifics/somnifacients, anorexics, etc. Bypass the useless oafs altogether. Of course, you risk jail. But you also risk no treatment, needless humiliation, and unwarranted disdain (as they sem to presume everyone is a druggie first, and a legitimate sufferer later) through abiding poorly-composed and nonsensical laws and suffering through the exorbitantly priced amd incredibly callous doctors charades and apathy. The choice, of course, is yours to make.