TEENS AND DRUGS: WHAT CAN WE DO?

The drug culture among teens is growing and the elixirs of choice are
becoming as varied as they are dangerous.

Where there was once marijuana use and the occasional teen
experimenting with cocaine or crack, now grows the use -- and
production -- of methamphetamine and a litany of prescription drugs
that are as deadly as they are addictive.

Oxycodone, Hydrocodone, Diazepam, Alprazolam, Valium, Zanax, all
painkillers and nerve calmers that come with a multitude of warnings
regarding their use and their mixture with other drugs.

None of that matters to teenagers. In some cases, teens are trading
drugs with their peers; in others, teens are stealing them from their
parents. In every case, they are being assembled into a walking
medicine cabinet where youngsters can sell their pharmaceuticals, use
them or swap them for other more pleasing substances.

The term most often being used for this latest drug culture is
pharming and pertains to the use and trade of prescription drugs.

It is hard to say what is most alarming about this latest drug fad,
but the fact that these drugs are highly addictive and deadly when
overused or mixed with other medicines makes the realities of what our
youngsters are doing now for a quick thrill extremely
frightening.

Some would argue that we are being alarmist by even highlighting this
latest in a long list of drug abuses by teenagers. The same group
would make light of the fact that we find there is a growing number of
young men and women trying drugs at younger and younger ages disturbing.

This same group would say that historically young people have
experimented with the drugs of their time and have, for the most part,
come away unscathed and, in many cases, become successful and
productive citizens.

To some extent that is true, but it does not, in our estimation, make
the illegal and illicit abuse of drugs right or excusable.

Nor does it make it any less frightening. In today's society, where
children are being born addicts and where those who aren't often live
in households where they are left to raise themselves, the growing
need for something to fill their lives and complete their existence
only solidifies the reasons we think people need to be concerned.

Drug use should not be an acceptable (more), nor should we explain it
away as a young person's attempts to spread their wings and live their
own lives.

Too many young people are becoming addicts; too many young people are
dying; too many young people are losing control of their lives and
becoming dependent first on the drugs and second on society to get
them out of the messes that their experiments are now leaving them
in.

With that in mind, we believe it is high time we became alarmed,
alarmed enough to do something about it before this growing problem
spirals so far out of control that it cannot be reigned in.