Risks of Experimenting with Drugs analysis

Experimenting with drugs particularly in early adolescent stages is highly related to poor outcomes in a person’s adult life. Most teenagers tend to experiment with alcohol and drugs in whenever they are idle. This has developed the urge amongst educational stakeholders including policy makers, parents and teachers to know the consequences of experimenting with drugs.  Parents particularly worry that if their children experiment with drugs they could suffer long term negative effects. These include; getting criminal records, dependence on drugs and being involved in risky sexual behaviors. They also worry that they could contract diseases that are sexually transmitted (STDs). This essay aims at explaining from a scientific perspective the risks that are involved when people especially teenagers experiment with drugs.

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Grant and Dawson, (2007) opine that the exposure to illicit drugs prior to age 14 has statistically predicted substance disorders in individuals’ adulthood. Exposure to drugs in the teenage stages is inclined to lead to crime, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) due to exposure to hazardous sexual behaviors, low attainment in education and early pregnancies. Contrastingly, Armstrong and Costello, (2012) argue that the early exposure to drugs and alcohol is not the actual cause of problems in the later lives of teenagers. However, research has repeatedly indicated that teenagers who experiment with drugs at an early stage tend to have a childhood record of conduct problems. This is in the end replicated in their adulthood (Grant and Dawson, 2007).

A recent study found out that teenagers who are at the risk of developing disorders associated with substance use were in many cases youth who had other peripheral problems (Armstrong and Costello, 2012). Policy makers, parents and teachers should thus ensure that they counsel teenagers under their care to avoid losing the current generation of teenagers to drug addiction. This could be done through advertorial programs that could ask parents to prevent their children from experimenting with drugs at an early stage for it is dangerous.

As much as it is not feasible to administer drugs to teenagers in randomized studies to find out the impact of early substance abuse on their future lives, analytical approaches from observational studies have been used to quantify treatment effects (Armstrong and Costello, 2012). The extend by which the teenagers experiment with drugs still puzzles scholars on the relation between their early experiments with drugs and its effects on their adult life. Researchers are thus calling for prospective longitudinal studies that would sufficiently account for conduct problems in childhood stages (Grant and Dawson, 2007).

In conclusion, it is certain that; experimenting with drugs particularly in early adolescent stages is highly related to poor outcomes in a person’s adult life. Teenagers stand a high risk of developing poor outcomes in their adult life which include; crime, low attainment in education, STDs and early pregnancies if exposed to drug abuse. There is thus an ardent need of stakeholders coming up with preventive measures to avert this crisis. Preventive measures should be done across board and should not be restricted to the cohort that is already at risk. As much as early experimentation with drugs may not be the only cause of problems in adulthood it should be prevented at all costs. This is because any efforts to minimize early exposure to drug abuse would in the long run end a myriad of health problems in adulthood.

References

Armstrong, T.D., & Costello, E.J. (2012). Community studies on adolescent substance use, abuse, or dependence and psychiatric comorbidity. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 70, 1224–1239.

Grant, B.F., & Dawson, D.A. (2007). Age at onset of alcohol use and its association with DSM-IV alcohol abuse and dependence: Results from the National Longitudinal Alcohol Epidemiologic Survey. Journal of Substance Abuse,9, 103–110.

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