Deadlier drugs -- but legal ones!

According to a new study, inhalant abuse among young people is a serious problem:

. . .one in five teenagers admits abusing household inhalants, like gas and glue, to get high. The president and CEO of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America says the most worrisome finding in the 2005 report is the decline in the risk attitudes among young people.

Steve Pasierb says a lot of teens don't understand that huffing can kill or cause brain damage. He says 64-percent of teens agree that inhalants can kill. That's down 19-percent from 2001. And he says there's a nine percent drop in the number of teens who agree that inhalants cause brain damage.

Pasierb says the report should be a wake up call to parents. He says too few parents believe their teens are at risk.

What I like about the campaign against inhalants is its emphasis on education. There's no attempt to prohibit the substances, despite the fact that they're everywhere:
These products are accessible to everyone, inexpensive, and subject to abuse by an unusually diverse range of people, including very young children, young adults in assorted occupations, and homeless adolescents and adults. This complex mix of substances and abusers, the technical difficulties of developing animal models that replicate human patterns of abuse, and ethical limitations on studying such toxic substances in humans have confounded attempts to clarify the addictive and toxic effects of inhalants and develop appropriate prevention and treatment interventions.

In spite of these challenges, there is some good news in the United States in that annual levels of inhalant abuse have declined since 1995, according to MTF. To what can we attribute this reduction? Research indicates that if young people believe they can suffer serious harm from abusing any substance, they are less likely to do so. Schoolchildren's perceptions of inhalants' risks began to increase between 1995 and 1996, and the downward trend in use began the following year.

The campaign against these legal drugs (which is what inhalants are) seems destined to remain an educational effort.

I can support that.

If only drugs like heroin and cocaine were treated like paint thinner . . .

But what if the illegal drugs like heroin are less dangerous than the legal ones like paint thinner? Are there moral implications?

posted by Eric on 04.24.06 at 12:22 PM





TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://classicalvalues.com/cgi-bin/pings.cgi/3530








March 2007
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
        1 2 3
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30 31

ANCIENT (AND MODERN)
WORLD-WIDE CALENDAR


Search the Site


E-mail




Classics To Go

Classical Values PDA Link



Archives




Recent Entries



Links



Site Credits