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)

My nephew lives in Montana where officials are in a battle against the worst infestation of meth production and addiction in the country. It turns out that teen boarding schools are growing in popularity there. Teen age drug abuse takes on an entirely different and menacing complexion when the drug is meth.

My nephew reported that two neighbors have opted to send their teens to a private boarding school because of the overwhelming prevalence of meth and meth culture in their community.

His neighbor made a very sad observation: “It began to seem like I was sending my daughter off to war every time she drove off to school. These meth addicts are dangerous, violent and they are everywhere.”

“Karen, whose parents were both addicts, grew up around drugs. She recalls as a child picking her father’s used needles off the floor.

She started shooting and smoking cocaine before progressing to methamphetamines.

The first time she shot up she was 16.

As she speaks, she rubs blotches of facial acne.

“This is the drug coming out of my system,” she says, noting meth has also started to burn holes through her nose.

Despite developing pockets of infection throughout her body, she still craved the drug, she says.
[…]
“I’ve been raped numerous times. You’re bought and sold but nobody cares,” she says. “I was sold by boyfriends to support their habits.”

She says she willingly gave up custody of her children because she knew her drug habit was hurting them.

Though not yet 30, she says she felt “too old to change.”

(Source)

That is what has become so unnerving. Addiction is now becoming two and three generations deep, each disintegrating family perpetuating the poison of drugs from one generation to the next, weakening, inch by inch, the social fabrics of entire communities.

“They found stacks and stacks of crisp, green U.S. $100 bills. In closets, in drawers, and suitcases. The attorney general’s office arranged the bills into a huge, bed-shaped platform, with Ben Franklin beaming from a thousand eyes. The first estimate by authorities put the take at $100 million. Then the bill-counting machines came in and the figure topped $200 million. It was the biggest drug cash seizure ever.”

The cash didn’t belong to the usual Mexican drug cartels but represented the profits of Chinese naturalized Mexican who set up shop directly across the Texas border and “who is accused of using his Asian contacts to illegally import the precursor drugs to make the new star of the U.S. and Mexican drug markets: methamphetamine.”

The article suggests that a teen crisis intervention of an entirely different complexion is needed to combat the influx of synthetic drugs surging across the border in the form of cheaply made and easily acquired synthetic meth. For the drug cartels competing for a portion of the addict market, their profit is considerably increased with the production of meth and the new heroin “Cheese” in comparison to the costs associated with cocaine or marijuana.

“Mexican cartels are not just supplying demand for meth, a Mexican official said, but creating it as well.
[..]
“It is a diabolical plan by these criminal organizations” to increase sales of homemade amphetamines as an alternative to South American cocaine, which must be grown, processed, and transported thousands of miles.

“The lesson we get from this is very painful,” said Mr. Vasconcelos. “The American people have yet to wake up from the nightmare of synthetic drugs, especially the nightmare that has brought them to methamphetamines.”
(Source)