My Blog

In any drug detox program, it is important for the health professional to be aware of the underlying cause of addiction. Obviously, a lot of times, a familiar scenario is that a teenager tries a drug at a party and then continues on to abuse it. However, even in this scenario, there is already a multitude of factors that go into making a decision of trying a drug. How did the teenager end up at a party like this in first place? One of the possible causes that comes to mind is that a teenager felt that he/she associated with the fellow students/friends that invited him and wanted to go and have a fun time. However, while at the party, the teenager might have realized that s/he is in a rather dangerous situation. To me, what is the most frustrating thing is that at parties, or at other events with “elevated adrenaline”, the sensation of danger is altered in a way that a regularly dangerous situations are still perceived as dangerous, but one might feel a certain gist to go ahead and experiment with the situation – what if, despite the perceived danger, everything will turn out to be OK, and the person will come out feeling that he/she had accomplished a dangerous situation successfully. There is obviously a certain ego associated with such, but that’s just human nature. So, back to the teenager. So, given the fact that a teenager senses that he/she has to leave the party that’s turning into a drug fiesta, a person might just be subjected to peer pressure. “What are you, a coward?” – to hear something like that is a major red flag for a teenager, just like the red flag for a bull in Spain (even though I think that it has been proven that bulls, instead of reacting to a specifically red flag, react to anything that moves). Knowing that it is time to go home, the teenager still stays, and, under the influence of peer pressure, or, possibly curiosity, adrenalin rush, or whatever else it might be, tries the drug – and this is where the vicious circle begins. The teenager might be OK after all, meaning that his/her system did not take the drug as an addictive substance right away, and if that is the only time that he/she tries the drug, the outcome might be just fine. In other cases, one of the steps in several years down the road ends up being a drug detox program (in the best case scenario), meth treatment, or opiate rehab.