Troubled Teens Resources

Teen age drug abuse is an issue parents need to start worrying about way before high school these days. Troubled teens are being introduced to drugs and alcohol before they are officially teens and many parents are unaware. I wonder and worry that by the time my son gets to elementary school there will be a drug dealer on the playground.

“Substance abuse is alarmingly common among today’s youth. According to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention at the U.S. Department of Justice, by the eighth grade, 52 percent of adolescents have consumed alcohol, 41 percent have smoked cigarettes, and 20 percent have used marijuana. Additionally, half of all high school seniors report drinking alcohol in the past 30 days with a third reporting being drunk at least once in the same period.

Teens who use drugs and alcohol regularly or episodically — meaning they use them in abundance whenever they can get them — could suffer both short- and long-term harm. Depending on the substance, the child could experience cognitive thinking and memory problems, chemical imbalances, sleep disturbances, appetite changes and mood disruption.
Because adolescence is such a turbulent time with so many physical and emotional changes anyway, parents need to be especially watchful to detect substance abuse issues.Whether your child is abusing or you just want to minimize the chances he or she will, the strategy is the same: Pay attention. Know your children, know their friends and pay close attention to their behavior. Make the time to drive your kids to and from events. Above all, talk with them about anything and everything, including drugs and alcohol.

Research from the Partnership for a Drug-Free America indicates that kids who learn a lot about the risks of drugs at home are up to half as likely as their peers to try or use drugs. So, simply by talking to your kids about the dangers of drug use, you can help them to be drug free.”

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K.D.

Teen crisis intervention is usually not the purview of United Way. Long recognized for their work with the poor and homeless, the only contact they generally have with troubled teenagers is in that context. However, so impressed were they with the community’s concerns about drug addiction that they want to tackle that too.

“Brian Sipe, board president of the UWA, announced earlier this week that the organization would solicit proposals from nonprofit, governmental, educational and law enforcement agencies interested in garnering support for initiatives geared toward having a positive impact on substance abuse issues in Aroostook.
[…]
The UWA’s decision to gather the proposals comes on the heels of findings received from the organization’s first-ever communitywide assessment project… Substance abuse was tagged as a major worry for community members, according to the assessment. Respondents expressed anxiety about the toll drug abuse and addiction has taken on communities. They also feared newer, more dangerous drugs eventually would arrive…
[…]
“Everywhere we went, from the southernmost tip of Aroostook to the northernmost tip, we heard concerns about substance abuse,” Stevens, the executive director of the UWA, said Wednesday. “As a board, we read through the community assessment and we realized that there is a great deal of concern about this issue, but it is not something that we are really putting a lot of money into as an agency at this point.”

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Teen crisis intervention is hard to implement in a community where parents and citizens tend to be in denial. Wealthier communities may have a particularly hard time understanding that drugs and drug problems are no longer confined to certain demographics. Troubled teenagers come from both sides of the track.

And what is true in America is apparently also true in Great Britain. One mother, desperate for her son’s life, lashes back at her wealthy neighbors for failing to take the problem seriously.

“One local mother says it’s time for parents to wake up and realize all youths are at risk of becoming drug addicts.

Peggy Strife, who lives in a $400,000 home in a good neighbourhood, has been grappling with her 20-year-old son Brad’s crystal meth addiction for the past several years.

“I’m waiting for him to die,” said Strife about her son…Strife and her spouse lived through their own period of denial about what drugs were doing to Brad. She doesn’t want to see anyone else ignore the problem.

Strife disapproves of recent letters to the editor in the Herald where people have expressed opposition to building a youth treatment centre here.

“We have a high drug rate here and people don’t want to admit it,” Strife said.

When Strife was cruising the streets with a baseball bat, attempting to stop her son from finding and using meth, she rarely tracked down her son in areas like the West Flat, which she says tend to be associated with substance abuse issues.

“A lot of the houses I was at were on the East and West hills,” said Strife. She estimated that there were six youth drug dealers within a five-block radius of her upper-class home.

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