What Do Most Teenagers Think About Heroin?
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Parents might anticipate one day coming across a bag of marijuana in their adolescent or teenager's sock drawer. Normalized as less harmful, the discovery of marijuana warrants a conversation about substance use, experimentation, and new rules. Marijuana addiction is a real problem that adolescents and teens can face. Heroin addiction is also a real problem and typically solicits much more dramatic reactions from parents. Discovering a small bag of drugs that are not immediately identifiable is a terrifying moment for a parent. Most often, heroin is white or brown in color though it may be a variation of either shade. Powdery in form wit a sticky like look to it, heroin immediately sends chills as a problematic discovery. Parents who find bags of heroin among their child's belongings are shocked and scared.
Many teens, however, don't think of heroin as a real problem. Getting heroin, that is, seems impossible to them. According to a Saint Louis University study that compared data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health in both 2002 and 2014, many teens think getting heroin is probably impossible. More than 200,000 records for children between the ages of 12 and 17 were analyzed to illustrate a picture of adolescent thinking regarding heroin. Just under 40 percent of adolescents in 2002 thought heroin was probably impossible to get. For current adolescents growing up in the face of a nationwide, as well as worldwide, heroin epidemic, about 50 percent feel heroin is probably impossible to obtain. Simultaneously, this is promising and threatening. On the one hand, the naivete of teenagers means they aren't looking for heroin. However, this sort of ignorance can mean they are not aware of the very real dangers regarding heroin, how to identify if their friends are using heroin, what heroin might look like if it were offered to them, or where to find heroin use treatment programs.
Beneficially, the data indicates that the exposure of adolescents to illegal drugs like heroin is not quite the vulnerability many adults believe it to be. Like children exposed to strangers with candy, the image of teenagers includes not lollipop bearing strangers in unfamiliar cars, but drug-yielding strangers in unfamiliar cars. Some areas of the nation of recently reported on drug dealers handing out heroin for free going so far as to toss bags of the drug into open car windows. Isolated exposure to drugs is still a saving grace as too many are ravished by heroin addiction.
If your teen or adolescent male is struggling with heroin addiction, there is help available. Stonewater Adolescent Recovery Center offers full-time residential treatment programs with academic support for heroin addiction, alcoholism, and other addiction issues. Focused on building a positive foundation of recovery, our programs in Mississippi provide life cleansing therapies for mind, body, and spirit. Call us today for information: 662-598-4214
