October 19th, 2007 by Ann Walker
It is amazing that childhood remedies - simple medicines designed to alleviate the discomforts of the common cold, are now a target in the campaign against teen age drug abuse. But when troubled teens are determined to get high, they will find any possible method available to do so.
DXM is the primary ingredient in cough medicines that teens seek as an intoxicant. It can be found in your medicine shelf and at your local drug store. But as parents wise up and start putting these simple medicines under lock and key, as are drug stores, teens are simply turning to the internet.
“There are a number of disreputable websites that provide “how-to” guides to get high off of DXM. These sites include information recommending how much DXM to use, suggest other drugs to combine with DXM, provide instructions on how to extract DXM from cough medicines, promote drug abuse in general, and even offer for purchase a raw, unfinished form of DXM for snorting.”
Recent legislation passed in the house,the Dextromethorphan Distribution Act of 2007, is designed to thwart the sale of bulk DMX.
“In 2005, two teenagers in my district died after overdosing on unfinished DXM they bought on the Internet,” said Congressman Rick Larsen. “The loss of these children is a tragedy that will be forever felt by their families and communities. We cannot continue to allow this dangerous drug to be only a click of the mouse away from our homes and our children. I urge the Senate to act quickly and approve this common sense measure to protect our kids.”
(source)
Relevant Tags:cough medicine abuse, cough medicines, dxm, internet, teen age drug abuse, troubled teens
September 13th, 2007 by Ann Walker
The most critical tool for teen crisis intervention with troubled teens is knowledge. That means that parents need to equip themselves with information that will enable them to identify when a teen is high, identify illegal substances, be aware if any particular drug is making headlines in their town. For instance, parents in Texas are on the look out for cheese heroin and _. Montanans need top be very wary of meth and Northeasterners are seeing heroin slowly making inroads.
A lot of information is available on the internet and indeed, that is where your teen is getting his. But what if you are monitoring your teen’s online activities but you have run into an unexpected language barrier. Enter NetLingo.com - the parents guide to the arcane teen languages used in the digital world.
- 95% of parents didn’t recognize the lingo kids use to let people know that their parents are watching
- 89% of sexual solicitations are made in either chat rooms or Instant Messages
- 20% of children age 10-17 have received unwanted sexual solicitations online; that’s one out of every five kids
- 75% of youth who received an online sexual solicitation did not tell a parent
- 81% of parents of online youth say that kids aren’t careful enough when giving out information about themselves online
- 76% of parents don’t have rules about what their kids can do on the computer
- 65% of parents believe that kids do things online that they wouldn’t want their parents to know about
- 4,000,000 children are posting content to the Web everyday
- 15,000,000 youth use Instant Messaging
NetLingo.com
Relevant Tags:chat rooms, instant messaging, internet, netlingo, parents guide, teen crisis intervention, teen lingo, troubled teens
