Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

A question for older folks: what did drugs do for us? Why did we do them?

For me, drugs were:

- socialization. I met a lot of friends through alcohol & drugs and they became the social glue for my circle. Alcohol & drugs became a large part of my identity.

- a way to cope with boredom. Every day is a party when you're high.

- identity. In my generation, drugs were mostly cool and associated with iconoclasts, artists, etc.

Young people's culture changed. I don't think kids see alcohol, drugs and being out of control as cool anymore. I don't know specifically what changed this. Better social messaging, mass prescribing of ADHD meds, more competitive job markets.. Social media and multiplayer gaming have both ramped up competitive drives for what used to be more relaxing activities. Maybe the current optiate and meth epidemics are more effective as a warning than, say, the crack epidemic was for us?

Kids have tech to glue them together(poorly in many cases, but it does fill the niche). Kids have internet subcultures to define their cultures now. Alternative lifestyles are much more accessible and take much less risk to participate in vs my childhood in the 80s. You don't need drugs to meet people or forge common identities.

Kids are never bored anymore. I suspect there has never been a better time to be a kid in a boring small town. If you have bandwidth, you have culture. You have better shipping, home delivery, cheap imports, etc. Affluence seems more common than it used to be, even in our highly divided economy.

Gen Z here and people are definitely still doing drugs and drinking, but it does seem massively less.

Just a personal anecdote, but there’s still a lot of house parties and stuff going on, and most people will have a couple drinks, some will have none, etc. But you are absolutely expected to handle yourself appropriately, getting too drunk or taking drugs you couldn’t handle isn’t tolerated and you’ll find yourself uninvited to future events. It is significantly more socially acceptable to drink no alcohol and take no drugs, than it is to get too drunk and act inappropriately.

> It is significantly more socially acceptable to drink no alcohol and take no drugs, than it is to get too drunk and act inappropriately

From what I’ve seen, this is partly a function of embedded social media. A drunk night at a friend’s isn’t just a bad decision, it reflects poorly on everyone in the room, including the host, in a semi-permanent and semi-public way.

Handling your stuff isn't all that new. Unless you're hanging with very close friends you always needed to not be a problem or you wouldn't get invited back.

I'm curious what GenZ+ thinks about the movie "The Boys & Girls Guide to Getting Down" which is a tongue-in-cheek, funny look at mid 00's partying culture in LA. That's not really my generation, but is a bit of a window into what I think was the last generation to really embrace intoxication.

As a millennial this is just great.

The more i read about GenZ’rs and their attitude to work and life the more i like this generation.

Yes, people should be expected to handle themselves appropriately. Getting black-out wasted with alcohol is not cool. It’s just unhealthy. Way to go!

Yeah but at some point the life of the party became boring because it was all day every day. So we just hung out and smoked weed and played SNES, PSX on a daily basis and went to clubs on weekends and cafés from wed/thur onwards.

I met so many people only through smoking weed. And because weed is such a laid back drug, we were all laid back and friendly with each other.

What I learned to hate over the years was that daily routine of finding something to smoke. We had our dealers we phoned up or sometimes we would deal ourselves to finance our consumption.

Dealing drugs was another level though. Hostilities arose. Some people claimed turf and threatened others with violence, those were "miraculously" found by the police and landed in jail. Also dealers that scammed others. The scene had a way to police themselves. Those were the good years.

Later the quality became worse and the quantity as well. It was no longer... how should I put it,... fun and games but people discovered it as a source of making profit. Even friends or people you considered friends would try to scam you and you weren't any different. That time began approximately when the Afghanistan wars began and the CIA was cut off from the cannabis sources.

It was like this, we would smoke weed in the summer and black afghan in winter. The black afghan fell off. What remained was green hash from the turks and weed, which was stretched with hairspray and silica sand.

I quit doing ganja, also because I hated being stoned all day every day and having to do the daily finding weed routine. I was so tired of it, also "what am I doing with my life".

I lost most "friends", I had to, to not be exposed to this crap on a daily basis. I wanted to get somewhere in life not just consume weed all day and be a loser who got nothing done. Better late than never.

I very rarely do resin nowadays, not by smoking but orally, and it's like once a year or every 2 years. Cannabis is definitely good for your health, if not overdone.

The improved treatment, and acceptance, of ADHD is certainly one key element here. I hope we continue to support kids if they show symptoms of any psychological disorder.

Here's a 2018 study following kids into adulthood and questioning them on their substance abuse: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5985671/

My brother is one of those really bad cases, while I got my diagnosis just recently; never had more than a slight drinking problem which has almost disappeared since the I started taking medication.

  getting too drunk or taking drugs you couldn’t handle isn’t tolerated
  and you’ll find yourself uninvited to future events. It is significantly
  more socially acceptable to drink no alcohol and take no drugs, than it
  is to get too drunk and act inappropriately.

That doesn't sound all that different than previous generations. SXE's been a thing since the 80s. Not everyone is Bret Easton Ellis. I don't think that attitudes have changed all that much, but circumstances have. Inflation and wage stagnation mean less discretionary spending. Fentanyl analogues mean street drugs are significantly more lethal than in generations past. Legalized marijuana means there's less mystery and motivation to experiment further.

I've interacted with a number of Gen Zers in their 20s and Millenials in their early 30s, some in passing and some on a more regular basis. In my experience that cohort spans the gamut. Some are teetotalers, sure. Most use drugs (cocaine, ketamine, assorted off-label prescription stuff, marijuana, etc.) at least occasionally, some daily. It really doesn't seem all that different from when I was their age. Excluding peer pressure, most of the societal ills that drove my peers to experiment with drugs still apply. Conversely I've seen a lot of my peers start to dial back drug and alcohol use as they get older.

I am about to turn 40 very soon. Do I fall in that generation? Because all those things did hold true and was there when I was growing up/adulting. But I never felt any need of it and many didn’t. But many did. Many still do. Because those small pockets are still around where drug is still cool and even back then those were small pockets!

One of the reasons is - it has become too difficult and costly (at least where I live). Even for weed, which was pretty much kosher unless you were caught by the police keeping KGs on your person or home, it has become too difficult to procure and not get caught. That could be a reason.

In many places where weed is available like cigarettes - maybe it’s not the forbidden fruit anymore. That danger or aura of different is gone with it.

We can take a good thing too far (and probably are at that point). ADHD is being overdiagnosed and medication is being overprescribed, especially in young men.

Over-diagnosis would mean we'd see a lot of kids and adults being diagnosed with ADHD despite being normal/typical. Granted ADHD shows in a spectrum of symptoms but I can't find any study that systematically re-tested patients to find over-diagnosis.

There might be clinicians who diagnose ADHD much more freely than others and whose verdict might not withstand the critique of a more experienced clinicians, but that can happen with any other disease, especially when it's still being studied and not every doctor has learned about it during his medical education. Just look at the speciality of psychiatrists near you, you might for 10 times more for depression than for ADHD. Despite both having the same prevalence and depression often being a comorbidity of ADHD.

Over-prescribed medication, well it is a problem because of the myth that Ritalin would help studying but at least here in Austria it there's enough hurdles to get a prescription. And the meds alone won't fix ADHD.

What we know from studies are under-diagnosis in women and the severe effects an undiagnosed ADHD can mean for a person. What we also know from studies is the under-diagnosis of girls, only in adulthood the gender-ratio of late diagnosis is almost even. Please don't talk ADHD down, it's too severe and we have a hard enough life already without being told by others that suddenly everyone has ADHD...

I don't think we've hit overdiagnosed, I think we've massively underestimated how many sufferers there are. But assuming you're right, so what?

There's an argument to be made that getting the diagnosis right for kids is imperative because the medication is essentially impressed upon them but for adults, who cares? They're not cheap, the side effects are kinda awful, it's annoying to get the dosing right so you don't build up a tolerance, you have to go to a doctor every time you need your rx renewed. If someone without adhd is going through all that because stimulants help then power to 'em I guess. There's not really a downside, stimulants at the doses prescribed for adhd aren't life ruining.

It certainly was cool and expected to get “too drunk” when I was in high school and college. It was really not cool to have zero drinks.

It reminds me of Mitki[1]. Their way to go to the party is to bring a bottle of vodka and drink it in one go before knocking at the door. Such a guy would seems ok and would be welcomed by the host, but in a 10 minutes he would become really drunk, while everyone around him is still 100% sober.

Completely non-gen-z way to behave, I suppose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitki