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.

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.