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I think it’s safe to say that most teenagers have tried and/or abused alcohol or illegal drugs, yet teen substance abuse rarely gets the attention it needs. Drugs and alcohol have a more detrimental effect on the underdeveloped brain, particularly since teens lack the ability to adequately assess risk, making them more likely to overindulge in substances. It’s this same lack that explains why people tend to be braver and more open to trying new experiences as teens than as adults. But this courage comes at a cost, as teens cannot adequately assess the risks of the substances they are taking. And schools aren’t doing nearly enough to educate them.
I remember seeing presentations from a program called DARE, or Drug Abuse Resistance Education, when I was in school. Although we were taught to avoid drugs, the focus was more on avoiding criminal behaviour than protecting our bodies. There wasn’t much focus on long-term effects of drug use. They always maintained that abstinence from drug use was best and that marijuana was the gateway drug, though I believe it’s become pretty obvious that alcohol better serves that description. Alcohol is readily available and easy to obtain, be it from parents’ liquor cabinets or fridges, older siblings, or underage bars.
Teens are faced with tremendous pressure, from their parents, their teachers, and especially their peers — it’s no wonder it is so easy to reach out for that escape, to keep your mind off all of the stresses, but also to just be cool and to fit in.
So How Can We Tackle This Issue?
According to an Icelandic psychologist, Gudberg Jonsson, just twenty years ago Icelandic teens were among the heaviest drinking youths in all of Europe. Apparently you couldn’t even walk downtown in Reykjavik on a Friday night without being bothered by rowdy teenagers getting wasted. He says it felt unsafe. These days, Iceland has various after school classes in facilities that include heated swimming pools and clubs for music, dance, or art.
Iceland now tops the European table for the cleanest living teens. The percentage of 15- and 16-year-old teens who had been drunk in the previous month dropped from 42% in 1998 to 5% in 2016. The percentage of cannabis users has even dropped from 17% to 7%, and those smoking cigarettes every day fell from 23% to 3%.
This country has been able to achieve such a successful turnaround thanks to what might best be described as enforced common sense. “This is the most remarkably intense and profound study of stress in the lives of teenagers that I have ever seen,” says Milkman. “I’m just so impressed how well it’s working.”
Milkman believes that if this model were adopted in other countries it could benefit the physical as well as psychological well-being of millions of kids worldwide.
How Does This Become a Problem?
“Any college kid could say: why do they start? Well, there’s availability, they’re risk-takers, alienation, maybe some depression,” he says. “But why do they continue? So I got to the question about the threshold for abuse and the lights went on – that’s when I had my version of the ‘aha’ experience: they could be on the threshold for abuse before they even took the drug, because it was their style of coping that they were abusing.”
Milkman helped develop the idea that people were addicted to changes in the brain chemistry, rather than the drug itself. “People can get addicted to drink, cars, money, sex, calories, cocaine – whatever. The idea of behavioural addiction became our trademark,” he says.
This is what spawned another idea: “Why not orchestrate a social movement around natural highs: around people getting high on their own brain chemistry – because it seems obvious to me that people want to change their consciousness – without the deleterious effects of drugs?”
By 1992, Milkman’s team in Denver had been granted $1.2 million from the government to fund Project Self-Discovery, which offered teenagers natural high alternatives to drugs and various crimes.
One of the most effective ways to cut alcohol abuse anywhere is to raise the cost of alcohol – if necessary by taxing it. The alcohol lobby is too powerful to allow this to happen. Teen binge drinking is a major epidemic in New Zealand.
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