Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

I’ve seen kids not even 3-4 years old already hooked to smartphone screens. Even toddlers around 1 year old with an smartphone mount in their stroller.

Main impact on kids is lack of socialization, lack of emotional regulation and a complete impact on their capabilities to keep their attention. Those used to be indicators for a future failed adulthood.

I remember traditional drugs only becoming present around 14-16 years old. Alcohol was probably the most prevalent, and probably the most dangerous. Followed by Cannabis, tobacco and some recreational drugs like MDMA.

Most of those drugs had a component that actually pushed kids heavily towards socialization and forming peer groups. Now looking back to the results of that drug consumption I would say that most of the individuals engaging on them were able to regulate and continue to what it seems to be a very normal adult life. Obviously tobacco with terrible potential future health effects, but beyond that, everyone I know turned up pretty healthy. Not only that, I remember some time later that the most experimental group (mdma, LSD, mushrooms) of drug users being full of people with Master Degrees and PhDs.

The new technological drugs scare me way more than the old traditional ones. Obviously it is a normal response of the known va unknown. Time will tell.

(Edit: corrected typographical error.)

When you look at https://explodingtopics.com/blog/screen-time-for-teens it does not look promising. Video is leading, then Gaming which can include socialization then third come Social media but with Tik Tok leading which I would not categorize as socialization.

I can’t find it right now but I read a great comment on legalization that pointed out that a kid experimenting with weed and cocaine in college is doing so for a radically different reason than a kid doing it escape the daily misery of his ghetto neighborhood.

This is also why you’ll often see staunch opposition to legalization in the lower socio-economic classes, with them having seen people close to them destroyed by drug use.

And yes, legalization and regulation would of course also allow harm reduction. But it is good to be able to take the opposition’s perspective :)

Counterargument: a "very normal adult life" in our generations treats alcohol as basically mandatory for having a good time with a group. As someone who doesn't drink, I'm perfectly happy to go to parties and hang out and socialize, but as the night wears on it becomes less and less stimulating as the alcohol kicks in. People get less interesting on drugs, but they perceive themselves to be having more fun. It's a crutch.

Now, maybe having a social crutch like alcohol is better than having a drug which encourages disappearing from the physical social world entirely, but our generation's answer was hardly healthy.

But isn't this a false correlation, then? Were they destroyed by drug use, or by the daily misery of their ghetto neighborhood?

What I’m seeing now is social media got so hyper optimized for engagement that it became a passive consumption mechanism, and the only “socialization” left is sharing memes. It’s a widespread digital heroin epidemic

And I agree. I do not drink, not even in social settings, and I feel like I'm the odd one out for doing so, thus I typically avoid parties and gatherings as much as possible.

I do take something people would consider a drug though, but for different reasons you described. It is to manage pain, anxiety, and depression, difficulty walking, and urinary incontinence. What I take works for all of the problems that affects the quality of my life.

That said, new year is coming up, and I'm definitely not going to drink.

If you’re going to make a harm reduction argument, you need to do your best to fully account for all the harms in play.

I particularly worry about men. The greater cultural and possibly (more controversial) biological susceptibility to isolation coupled with this stuff means a generation of young men who are isolated, hopeless, poor, lonely, and sexless.

Then we have a culture that, depending on which side you listen to, either shames them as potential rapists from the patriarchy or simply “losers.” (IMHO the “woke” shaming is just code for loser, as I have heard said in private.) They are neither. They are victims of exploitation, of a nearly exact analog to the Matrix that is destroying their minds.

I speak mostly of social media and addiction optimized gaming, not all tech. The problem is the apps not the phone. Really anything that works very hard to “maximize engagement” should be considered guilty unless proven innocent. This phrase is code for addiction.

As we have seen the gurus that appeal to such men are the likes of Andrew Tate. As awful as he is Jordan Peterson is actually among the less toxic of the crew since he does occasionally say something good.

In the future we could have gurus for hordes of lonely poor men that make Tate look helpful and wise. This is how we either LARP the Handmaid’s Tale or — worse — ISIS or the Khmer Rouge.

I have two daughters and I fear for their safety in a country full of fascism radicalized angry emotionally stunted men who have been told they are losers and then handed pitchforks.

Our industry is the industry making the opium to which these youth are addicted and that is destroying them. We are destroying the minds of a generation every time any B2C app tries to optimize its time on app KPI.

Mothers and fathers of boys: raise your sons or Andrew Tate will.

1) They can be socially isolated in ways that few children are. An unsupervised septuagenarian can go literal days without speaking to another live human being.

2) They’re more technologically competent than we give them credit for, certainly enough to spend days doomscrolling their politically aligned newsfeeds of choice. The generation who thought their CD-ROM drives were cupholders passed quite some time ago.

3) They have an outsized influence on politics. Not only do they vote more than any other demographic in the US, they are the most likely to turn up and harangue your city council or school board meeting.

Of course, nothing new under the sun, their parents’ generation was mainlining cable news and AM talk radio 20-30 years ago.

Our goal should be to legalize use and then take the money saved from police enforcement and funnel that into programs that get people off drugs. In the US an issue is that the latter part is part of the healthcare system, and we all know that has a lot of issues in serving people who fall into the under-employed category.

Now imagine that they would not be engaging with silly YouTube videos, but with an AI trying to get them to interact with them in order to learn to speak, to learn about the world. Things which parents can't dedicate enough time to. Then also give the kids ideas for what to do with the parents, what to talk about, tease them about science and stuff they'd normally have no access to, because it is information mostly hidden in books or in an inaccessible format, like dedicated to students.

I do see a huge potential in this, call it cheaply a "nanny for the brain", to help develop it better and faster. There are certainly risks to it, but if it were well done, in a way in which we assume universities are "places well done", it could be better than just having the kids watching TV.

This same reasoning is highly applicable to how various "so terrible, they're a threat to X!" are constantly vilified, yet the Normies (who cause most of the problems) get a free pass.

Rigged popularity contests are a terrible way to run a world, yet we insist on it.

While what you describe may be better than YouTube/TV, there is no replacement for development through human interaction and contact.

Let’s not give parents another excuse to have devices babysit/raise their children.

EDIT: and if your post is being upvoted -- and it seems to be -- I hope it's by people that don't have children, and will later realize how bad of an idea this is once they do have children.

That's an absurd mental picture you've imagined. Using that to undermine the discussion of the reality that people use drugs to temporarily escape from desperate conditions is unsettling and lacks empathy and judgment.

Anyone with a relative dying of addiction has no doubt been long exhausted in watching them circle the pit of their addiction. They are going to be under no illusions regarding the chances there were to escape it, and the choices made to remain there.

Asking if they were escaping from a miserable reality vs chasing a high isn't offensive. It's just dealing with the reality of the situation as it is. The only person I see being offended is someone in denial, blaming the drugs alone rather than allowing any blame to the person using them, trying to imagine them an innocent victim without agency in the matter.

The question is a good one. It actually looks for what caused everything to go wrong, rather than just being pointlessly offended on behalf of the imagined umbrage you think others might feel.

The solution is to replace the nanny/reschool/daycare with a better nanny/preschool/daycare.

You comment falsely assumes that I don't have familiarity or loss stemming from addiction.

Large numbers of desperate people are a danger to society. I harp on men because I think they are more vulnerable (for various reasons and the reasons don’t matter much) to isolation and radicalization, though as we recently saw with our young lady school shooter this is definitely not universal.

I also didn’t mean to dismiss the damage addictionware can do to young womens’ self esteem and mental health, and I have noticed a disturbing rise in “femcel” rhetoric that mirrors the incel cancer. The style of the rhetoric is a little different but it’s coming from similar places and has similar effects.

We need to stop calling it social media too. It stopped being social when algorithmic timelines were introduced and over time it’s evolving toward less and less connection and more shoveling of engagement bait slop.

There's at least a theory that people believe will work that hasn't been correctly implemented yet, but whether or not it's feasible to implement at all, I'm not holding my breath.

Cops will fight tooth and nail against social programs because it reduces their budget when problems are solved.

Look up these programs and you will see centrists claiming the progressive program was bad, but never indicate reasons as to why.

They did the decriminalisation step and then never bothered with the “redirecting savings from policing into services” step.

They also fucked it in other ways.

For an example of where it does work - see Portugal.

The issue was that he has seen these kids being entertained by smartphones. This kind of implies that they were not in daycare or any other position where they could interact with humans, unless the parents wanted to interact with them, which they obviously didn't (or couldn't, for whichever reason). That was the context.

Secondly, there is a while cottage industry of young kid's videos to just show kid's the world and engage via a screen with it and explain it. A 3 and 4 year old knows so little, they don't want even know what questions to ask because they know nothing. The value of slop like Blippie or even Ryan's World is alerting kids to the fact that things exist in a digestible way. And they need to loop it. They need to be exposed to the information many, many times to truly get it. Early education is in no way shape or form a good candidate for AI. I'd argue that the repetitive videos we have now are about as ideal as we can get once we filter out the surreal nonsensical videos targeted at kids.

The parent post is throwing AI at the problem. The solution isn't to improve technology to make it better at parenting/babysitting our children.

The solution is to replace technology with humans.

> This kind of implies that they were not in daycare or any other position where they could interact with humans

I'm not sure where it is ok for children, particularly early developing children, to not be around other humans, or humans that can't or don't want to interact with the children. If that's the case, that's another problem altogether.

If people are having children just to have them raised by technology/AI, I hope they realize that before having children and reconsider.

Why would AI be any different? I'd expect AI content for babies to be garbage because the incentive structure is exactly the same as it is for noninteractive videos.

I don’t think it tells us much about how well an ideally functioning decriminalization or legalization effort would work. It does update us in understanding that it’s difficult to accomplish this transition successfully.

It's okay to be wrong, even when emotional, so long as we learn from it.

We thus persist. Pleasant evenin' to you sir or madame.