Troubled Teens Resources

Teen age drug abuse is often the consequence of a teenager self-medicating in an attempt to defeat anxiety and depression. My good friend Angela described her inadvertent route to addiction via amphetamines.

What seems like aeons ago, methamphetamines were regularly - and liberally - prescribed as diet pills. Comic parodies of the age depicted diet pills as “mother’s little helpers”. Angela’s mother always had an ample supply and she discovered, at age 13, that they helped her whip through the homework that had been tedious hell before.

Unfortunately, Angela was coming of age in the “hippie” era and readily discovered that marijuana helped soothe the nerves that the diet pills rattled. By the time she was sixteen, she was a high functioning heroin addict. What started as a 13 year old self-medicating to deal with what is now recognized as ADD, turned into a 16 year long battle with drugs.

A recent study released on marijuana suggests that the same self-medicating mechanism is operative when a teen finds comfort in pot. Apparently, in small amounts, THC, acts as an anti-depressant.

“A new neurobiological study has observed that a synthetic form of THC, the active ingredient in cannabis, is an effective anti-depressant at low doses. However, at higher doses, the effect reverses itself and can actually worsen depression and other psychiatric conditions like psychosis.

It has been known for a number of years that depletion of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain leads to depression, so SSRI-class anti-depressants like Prozac and Celexa work by enhancing the available concentration of serotonin in the brain. However, this study offers the first evidence that cannabis can also increase serotonin, at least at lower doses.”
(source)