I have attached an interesting article from the Winnipeg Free Press, we all think "our kids are OK", or "not that bad", or "they wouldn't do that" but the truth is there are a lot more kids doing a lot more drugs than we think. This article doesn't even talk about alcohol, the number 1 drug, more on that tomorrow.
Rand
Be aware of possibility of drug use by teens, substance abuse centre urges By: The Canadian Press
OTTAWA - Most parents believe their teens are staying away from illegal drugs and prescription painkillers, a new survey suggests, but that might not reflect what's actually going on. The Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse commissioned the survey, which discovered 70 per cent of the parents polled who have children between 12 and 17 don't think their kids have experimented with drugs. Eighty per cent of parents and non-parents said they're confident they'd recognize signs of drug use in someone close to them, according to the responses of 1,002 Canadians surveyed by Harris-Decima from Oct. 28-31. Results of the telephone omnibus survey, released Monday, included 131 parents of children aged 12-17 living in the household. Michel Perron, CEO of the centre, said there's a gap between perceptions and reality. For example, the 2009 Ontario Student Drug Use Health Survey indicated that nearly one-third of those aged 15 to 17 and almost half those aged 18 and 19 reported using marijuana in the past year. "I think we typically tend to assume it's somebody else's child or young adult that's doing something," Perron said. "This is really meant to give parents a bit of a wake-up call and let them know that perhaps it is occurring in your home. You don't have to panic. There's opportunity for dialogue and having a discussion about what this is about with the young people in your home. It's appropriate for the parents to be aware." One in five respondents said there were prescription painkillers in their medicine cabinets at home. An overwhelming number of the parents — 92 per cent — said they did not believe their son or daughter had ever stolen these prescription medications from the cabinet at home, but this stands in contrast with the drug use health survey that indicated 18 per cent of Ontario kids in Grades 7 to 12 admitted to taking such drugs from their own home for non-medicinal purposes. "There's a real upswing in young people experimenting or using these pharmaceutical products, which are very powerful analgesics or narcotics in their own right," Perron said. "As a precaution, parents should really be minding these drugs safely in their homes, and disposing of them appropriately when they're done with them." The drugs are often prescribed to adults on the basis of a particular weight, age and need, and "just grabbing whatever's in the cupboard" could put someone at risk for a variety of outcomes, including overdose, Perron noted. Unused prescription drugs should be returned to the pharmacy for safe disposal, he said. Perron encouraged parents to become informed and talk to their teens about drugs, but not to go about it in a "semi-inquisition" manner. "As a parent of a couple teenagers myself, you kind of wonder at times what effect you have in terms of their listening to you," he said in an interview last week from Buenos Aires, where he had meetings. "Research shows time and time again that young people in their teens, particularly the 13 to 16 years range, do care very much what their parents think, so you have a strong opportunity as a parent to model behaviour, to counsel on behaviour." Resources are available at ccsa.ca and Xperiment.ca. The margin of error for the subgroup of parents surveyed with kids age 12 to 17 was plus or minus 8.6 percentage points.
