Teen Crisis Intervention via Taxation?
Teen crisis intervention by taxation? A new study suggests that prohibiting drug abuse isn’t sufficient and recent statistics and the interminable war on drugs seem to support that conclusion.
“More than 300,000 people worldwide between the ages of 15 and 29 died from the use of alcohol or illicit drugs in 2000, numbers that University of Victoria researcher Dr. Tim Stockwell called “substantial.”
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In the developed world, the deaths of 31 per cent of people between the ages of 15 and 29 could be linked to drugs and alcohol in 2000.“It’s by any account a large number of people dying prematurely from totally preventable causes…”
The study suggests that a perhaps a more effective method of discouraging troubled teens from drug use is a combination of “taxes, nagging and creative thinking”. The suggestion is that if you make drugs such as pot and heroin cost prohibitive through a system of regulation, as opposed to prohibition, that teens will be far more discouraged in their pursuit of a “high”.
Relevant Tags:crisis intervention, drugs and alcohol, drug use, illicit drugs, taxation, teen crisis intervention, teen crisis, troubled teens, war on drugs“The Lancet study found that regulating the use and sale of drugs works the best in preventing further abuse — if it’s expensive and harder to get, teens won’t use it.
“Controls on price, usually through taxation, are among the interventions with the highest evidence for effectiveness in reducing levels of harm in the population, especially for young people,” the study said. The conclusion has led Stockwell to wonder if a similar model is necessary for the sale of cannabis in Canada.”
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