Juvenile Drug Use Essays - Drug Culture, Psychiatric Diagnosis

Juvenile Drug Use A drug is a substance that alters the mind, body or both. Drug use is the increasing problem among teenagers in colleges today. Most drug use begins in the preteen and teenage years, these years most crucial in the maturation process (Shiromoto 5). During these years adolescents are faced with difficult tasks of discovering their self identity, clarifying their sexual roles, assenting independence, learning to cope with authority and searching for goals that would give their lives meaning. Drugs are readily, adolescents are curious and venerable, and there is peer pressure to experiment, and there us a temptation to escape from conflicts. The use of drugs by teenagers is the result of a combination of factors such as peer pressure, curiosity, and availability. Drugs addiction among adolescents in turn lead to depression and suicide (Shiromoto 12). One of the most important reasons of teenage drug usage is peer pressure. Peer pressure makes drugs seem popular, makes you have a fear of being an outcast, and since everyone is doing it, it is the cool thing to doright? Wrong. Peer pressure represents social influences that effect adolescents, it can have a positive, or a negative effect, depending on person's social group and one can follow one path of the other. We are greatly influenced by the people around us. In today's colleges, drugs are very common; peer pressure usually is the reason for their usage (www.nodrugs.com 1). If the people in your social group use drugs, there will be pressure a direct or indirect pressure from them. A person may be offered to try drugs, which is direct pressure. Indirect pressure is when someone sees everyone around him using drugs and he might think that there is nothing wrong with using drugs. People might try drugs just to fit in the social norms, even if a person had no intentions of using drugs one might do it just to be considered cool by his friends. Today drugs are considered to be an acceptable social phenomenon by many teenagers. If parents are involved with children on a day-to-day basis, they will more than likely know when the child starts to take drugs because of the big changes going on in their lives. There are many positive alternatives to drugs, so drugs are not the only fun and cool things to do (www.nodrugs.com 2). Before children descend into drug addiction a whole array of signals normally appears, suggesting the family is in trouble. Few people are equipped to recognize these signs (Henican 181). Stresses of everyday living is just too great a burden to bear alone; they feel like they need a protective shell, that invisible physic capsule they can hide inside. Most high school students said that some time in their lives they have used alcohol, drugs, or tobacco. More than seventy one percent of high school students have tried cigarettes, forty two percent have smoked marijuana, twenty seven percent had a cigar, seven percent tried cocaine, and eighty percent had a drink of alcohol (Dryfoos 26). In today's colleges the availability and variety of drugs is widespread. There is a demand for drugs and the supply is plentiful. Since drugs are so easy accessible, a natural interest in them may develop. A person may hear about drugs experiences, on reactions of drug usage, such as Hey the weed that he sold us was cool, I got stoned man. This response will create a sense of curiosity and may convince the person to try drugs themselves. Many teenagers today believe that the first use of drugs is safe. However, although there is no instant addiction with the first try, teenagers tend to experiment further (Teen Drug Abuse 3). Soon a person could actively seek the euphoric effects of drugs. Drug addiction is the result of intense preoccupation with the dicer to experience the mental and bodily changes with drug use. The final and the most disastrous stage are when a person needs drugs in order to function adequately. Therefore, availability, curiosity, and experimentation could result in drug addiction among teenagers (Teen Drug Abuse 6). One of the most devastating side effects of drug addiction and abuse is depression. Depression is the