Chemical Dependency: Chemical/Substance Abuse by Children and Adolescents

Childhood and adolescent are two prime stages of an individual’s life, this is the time that one is open to experiences and experiments in life. The things that one comes across are the things that one happens to draw lessons from and may end up making them part of everyday life. Children and adolescents’ cases of chemical and substance use and abuse is rampant in the present generation and it is seen to start mostly during the mid-adolescence. This time the young people are seen to be open to a lot of recreational activities and they may end up trying drugs as a way of enjoying the social aspects of life. In most cases, when adolescents reach the age of 18 years, approximately 66% have an experience with cigar rates, 13% of them smoke around half of a packet in a day. On the other hand, we find that 8% of adolescents have tried cocaine while approximately 15% have used a type of inhalants, hallucinogens or stimulants. In these cases, we find that there are some specific types of environments that make it easy for adolescents and children to experiment on drugs, these environments are; home when parents are not always present, upon joining high school and also upon joining colleges and campuses. Approximately 4.3% of the young people have their first attempts on drugs in the above mentioned environments.

Many parents fail to accept the fact that the children and adolescents are using a lot of drugs that even the studies that have been carried out have not covered fully. It is evident from studies that children as young as below 9 years old have admitted to have used drugs at some point of their young lives. The use of drugs by children and adolescents is encouraged mostly by the aspect of alcohol is being used as a recreational chemical, there will be less monitoring from parents and little strictness by the law in such places. This is what encourages abuse of chemicals and use of even more harder chemicals by children and adolescents. War against drug abuse needs to involve a lot of approaches if there is hope to alleviate drug abuse among adolescents and encourage them to grow into responsible adults. Adolescents are exposed to use of drugs by a number of factors like; joining college, busy parents and less family activities, peer influence, a lot of freedom and independence. Drug abuse has a lot of negative consequences on the lives of the adolescents, these include things like psychosocial distress, criminal behaviors, risky sexual behavior that can lead to teenage pregnancies, HIV and other STIs as well poor performance or even dropping out of school.