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Adolescent Drug Use

Adolescent Drug Abuse

Crack, booze, pot, crystal- from the inner city to the suburbs to small towns, the world of the adolescent is filled with drugs.   When a little harmless experimentation becomes addiction, parents, teachers, and society are often at a loss. For this age group (roughly ages 13 to 23), traditional substance abuse programs simply are not enough" (Nowinski, inside cover).
        Today's society provides many challenges for adolescents that our parents rarely had to face.   Pre-marital sex and pregnancy, alcohol abuse, and drug addiction have always been around but they have never been more of a problem to adolescents than they are now.   Adolescents are on their own to take care of themselves with more and more single parent households.   The problem of drug and alcohol is a major one.   Teenagers feel a need to drink and do drugs to fit in to peer groups.   The problem is spreading rapidly. The common thought is that drugs are only in the big city or where the poor live but that is wrong.   Any person can get drugs from the huge highly populated city to the small less populated towns of Texas and Nebraska.   It doesn't matter where you are.   There is a major need for adults to intervene and stop the problem at its beginnings, adolescents.   If we sit here and deny the fact that the problem is there then we are just setting ourselves up for disaster.

The first source that I used for my research was a book written by Dr. Joseph Nowinski entitled Substance Abuse in Adolescents & Young Adults.   It was written at the Elmcrest Psychiatric Institute in 1990.   The book described Dr. Nowinski's study of adolescent addicts of drugs and alcohol.   It goes on to explain the need for the development of treatment plans for adolescents because conventional plans do not work on this age group. The second source that I used was a journal article entitled "Prevalence of substance abuse in a rural teenage population."   It was written by Wade Silverman.   This article...