How common is it for teens/young adults to use drugs?

[sundestroyer]

I'm in my early 20s and in college but it seems that 90% of my classmates from secondary school use either coke, ecstasy, weed or GHB on a night out.

My parents told me to avoid drugs and I have to respect that as I'm in their house but I'm wondering, are they wrong about it? They always said "you can never be successful in life when using drugs" but I'm in an engineering course and it's not the 'low-lives'/wasters using coke in my class, it's the students who get straight A-s. They also attend college regularly

Perhaps it's a cultural thing. Most of the students in my class who use drugs are white (Irish or of European descent). The ones who don't come from Asia/Africa. It's known that African and non-western parents tend to be stricter so that might explain why their kids don't use drugs.

Would you allow your teens to experiment with drugs?

@AlternativePerspective that's exactly the sort of thing my brother & I would say to our Mum! She talked to us about drugs but we'd often say we wouldn't even know where to buy them.
Fingers crossed your ds is sensible and if he's into cycling etc drug talking may not be his thing.

Too many of my friends died or were permanently mentally damaged as a result of drugs for me to be relaxed about dc taking drugs.

My best school mate is still living with parents unable to work, srudy or do anything. You're crazy if you don't think any of that wouldn't happen to your dc.

I’ve got 3 dc. Aged 15,17 and 21. ALL of them have smoked weed. The middle one smokes it all the time.the youngest has only tried it a couple of times. The oldest one doesn’t do it because it doesn’t agree with him mental health wise. However he is partial to mdma and lsd. I know of one teenager that has never tried weed. One. Out of hundreds. It’s not like when we were young and could go out and get served and buy booze and cigarettes. They can’t get served anywhere. But they can buy weed. So that’s what they do. In my limited experience, once they grow up a bit and can go out and go to clubs etc they often swap the weed for booze. I’m not sure that’s better other than it’s legal . I don’t ‘allow’ them to, but I’m not naive, they have their own money, and I’d rather have open and honest conversations with them over drugs and what they’re doing than be overly strict and be blissfully unaware.

Plenty of my mates did and plenty of us didn’t. I’d say more like 50:50 than 1 in 4. I had a cousin who became a paranoid schizophrenic partially attributed to his cannabis use which put me off. And we went clubbing a lot...too much alcohol as a late teen but no illegal drugs. I’d assume that things are similar now.

Drugs are so much cheaper than alcohol where I live, from what I see it’s rampant across all cultural And economic groups.

just to be clear I'm not okay with my DC taking drugs.

But I know how abundant and tempting it is, which is why I did/do my best to arm them with as much info as possible, So they can make the better safest choices they can.

Yes I knew people who died due to drugs, and I certainly didn't sugar coat any details for the DC.

The clash of your experience of your peers' lives, with your parents' advice, highlights the limitations and dangers of the 'just say no' approach.

It's an approach based in ignorance and fear. My view is that knowledge is power. Knowing about the risks, likelihood of each risk and differences between particular drugs, allows people to make sensible decisions about risk versus reward.

You and some of your gung-ho friends will be at opposite ends of the obvious responses to 'just say no'. Yours is a blanket 'no'. Theirs is a 'well I know I can do this one without obvious harm, so I'm going to take it that 'say no' is stupid advice, they're all ok / I'm immune to bad outcomes, so I'll just take what I like'.

Knowledge allows people to make better decisions, to feel confident in their choices and crucially, to say no with full autonomy and confidence when they want to say no. Many of your peers will have gained knowledge through experience but knowledge gained within a pro-drug sub-culture is not the same as objective knowledge.

Knowledge of the drug supply chain and everything it relies upon, is very relevant too. Other than home-grown cannabis, there is no such thing as fairtrade, organic, ethically-traded illegal drugs. Some people really don't care about that. A lot of people do, in their other purchasing and lifestyle decisions and are just massive hypocrites when it comes to drugs.

So no, of course I wouldn't 'allow' my child to take drugs in my home. But I'd like them to be able to talk to me about their experiences in relation to drugs. That requires openness, knowledge and a shared awareness that people do take drugs.

I will certainly talk about my own experiences with and around drugs when younger. As my parents, once young in the 1960s, did with me. None of us did much. Dabdled lightly, got bored with the effects it had on us and on other people, found it took up time and mental space we'd rather devote to other things and moved on.

I also recognise that, for some parents, there comes a time when the choice is between allowing DC to use some drugs in your home and driving them out of your home, to do the same and worse in much riskier siutations, with riskier people.

OP, do you want to try drugs?

If you're happy with a 'just no approach' that, as you rightly say, is as much a cultural norm as an individual choice, then that's all fine.

Certainly your parents are wrong and recreational drug use is commonplace in some professions and places. I suppose there might be a risk, in some workplaces, that not joining in with that social scene is like not playing golf; so missing out on informal networking opportunities. Might it contribute to an 'othering' of colleagues of different social backgrounds (overlapping with skin colour)? I don't know.

But, so what? What would you want to do differently?

Strongly suggest people have a look at a charity named "anyone's child". Many stories or many parents who had no idea that their children were using drugs, and in hindsight wished they had been more realistically informed about the likelihood that they were. As an aside, lots of food for thought about why "just say no" simply doesn't work

Very naive to think we know everything our kids do. They often tell us what we want to hear IME.

A good friend of mine is adamant her DDs have never touched drugs, due to their sport/fitness etc. My DD tells me a very different story.

I've never taken any illegal drugs, never even smoked a cigarette although had a couple of instances when either I was drugged or drunk far too much in my late teens early 20s. I barely drink now.

I will educate my daughter on drugs, the effects and the potential consequences, just as I do the students I teach and hope she makes the right choices. I would not knowingly allow her to take drugs. It is quite telling when I teach about drugs and the amount of knowledge some young people (year 7 age 11/12) have about drugs.

Pretty much everyone I know tried smoking weed as a teenager (late 90s/early 00s) I liked it, but was too scared of getting in trouble to ever actually go buy my own so just at a few parties. The majority of my friends were the same. Mostly we just drank.

I had a couple of friends who were more into the dance music scene and clubbing, they definitely used harder drugs. I think ecstasy mainly, I don't remember coke being common then but maybe it was.

@BigSandyBalls2015 you're spot on there. My friend is adamant her ds is very open with her about everything, he likes a drink but would never touch drugs etc
Dd has shown me photos of him high as a kite, smoking, dancing after taking ecstasy etc

use of illegal drugs (unless grown yourself on property you own) supports knife crime, gang violence, cuckooking and county lines.

the occasional Darwin award death, usually of a posh white kid at a festival, isn't the issue. The above things are.

druggies fund scum and are therefore scum themselves.

@mencken thousands of people take drugs. They are not the scum of the earth and I know because I work with them. What a ridiculous generalisation and absolute nonsense.

"The War on Drugs" and making drugs a criminal justice issue, rather than a public health one, a policy which has been failing around the world for the last half a century, is what funds criminality and all that goes with it. Look at the Portuguese model. Drugs should be decriminalised but that that is not what this thread is about.

I don't know everything my 19 year old son does and that is how it should be! He is responsible, sensible, doesn't drink when he drives, is conscientious with his job, and off to start university this September. I talked to him and his friends when they went to festivals about the risks of buying drugs from strangers. I don't know if he has experimented with drugs, but I did and many people I know did during my teens (grass/speed/acid/mushrooms) and then later during the rave period. We are all fine now - most people who try drugs are totally normal - were not all losers.

I always made it totally clear to my teens that I do not approve of drugs, that I have known people on whom even moderate use of weed has had very serious effects, and that it is not something I would ever be happy about. As they grew older, I also made it clear (perfectly pleasantly) that I accepted that I could not (and should not) police their choices but that I had a right not to be pressured into saying I approved of something I didn't approve of and that I had a right not to have something I disapproved of in my home. Any choice they made that I didn't agree with was their responsibility. This approach has actually worked well.

In retrospect I believe my son has tried smoking weed once or twice but not made a habit of it. My daughter moves in circles where cocaine use is extremely common but has never tried it or weed herself. She has never experienced that this has left her outside of networking- and she is in training for an industry where networking is absolutely crucial. But then she is an extremely sociable person who is fun to be around when sober and who doesn't judge other people.
She has certainly seen plenty of cases where use of weed has led to poorer performance in studies.

I did weed drugs once. It changed the very course of my life. Not in a bad way necessarily but I basically moved to a different country, change career track entirely, ended up married etc. all off the back of this trip.

Wow. Some shit.

Kinda puts the times that I shagged a stranger or fell asleep on a train platform into perspective.

Nearly everyone takes drugs. It's just that for some inexplicable reason many adults think their drug of choice (alcohol) "doesn't count".

Teenagers are pretty alert to adults' hypocrisy. Which is a good thing.

No one would recommend you do drugs. But yes I did plenty and most of my friends when we were that age group. Were not all wasters, most have families and some sort of career. Some are addicts. Some are wasters. As is the balance of life. Dont do it if you have an addictive personality or a self destructive trait

the occasional Darwin award death, usually of a posh white kid at a festival, isn't the issue. The above things are.

So a young person - ‘posh’ or otherwise, dying of an overdose doesn’t matter?
Really?