- Details
- Hits: 979
Understanding Factors Influencing Adolescent Substance Use
The teenage years are a time of growth and change, but they can also be a time of risk. (See Exploration or Experimentation – Who Says?)During this stage, young people are heavily influenced by the people around them, especially their friends. When peers use drugs or drink alcohol, it can have a big impact on whether a teenager decides to do the same. But why does this happen, and what can make some teens more likely to follow their friends—or more likely to say no?
Here, we’ll look at the things that increase or reduce the risk of young people trying harmful substances. By understanding these factors, parents, schools, and communities can come together to protect young people and help them make healthier choices.
Why Are Teenagers Influenced by Their Friends?
Teenagers often want to fit in and be accepted, which can make them more likely to copy their friends’ behaviour. At the same time, their brains are still developing, especially the parts responsible for decision-making and self-control. This combination means teens are more vulnerable to peer pressure.
“Social influences are central, powerful factors that promote experimentation or initiation of substance use. Along with exposure to positive attitudes and expectations regarding substance use, the modelling of substance use behaviour by important others (e.g., parents, older siblings, and peers) is a critical negative social influence.” (Source: PMC) (See Thermostat or Thermometer – Who’s calling the shots?)
Research shows that while this influence is strongest between the ages of 12 and 15, it starts to lessen as teenagers get older. This is why it’s so important to help guide young people early on, before they fall into habits that could harm them.
How Family Can Protect Teens
One of the most powerful ways to protect teenagers from trying drugs or alcohol is through strong family relationships. Teens who feel close to their parents and know that their family disapproves of substance use are less likely to try it, even if their friends do.
However, the opposite is also true—if siblings or other family members use substances, it can make teens more likely to follow that example. Families play a major role in setting a good example and creating a home environment free from harmful substances.
The Role of Schools
Schools play a huge part in shaping how young people think and behave. Schools that take a strong stance against drugs and alcohol create a safer environment for students. When teens feel connected to their school and are engaged in activities, they are less likely to follow peers into risky behaviours.
Conversely, teenagers who struggle with schoolwork or who attend poorly managed schools are at a higher risk of being influenced by substance-using peers. Schools need to offer more than lessons—they need to help students feel supported and part of a community with positive values.
Friends and Social Groups Matter
The friendships teens form can be both a risk and a safeguard. Teens with supportive friends who don’t use drugs or alcohol are less likely to try these substances. But for those with friends who do use them, the pressure to fit in can be strong.
Close friendships can sometimes work against teens if substances like alcohol or cannabis are seen as normal in their social circle. Encouraging teens to mix with a variety of peers and to join positive social groups can reduce this risk. (See Beating the toxic contagions and becoming a ‘change agent’)
Community Factors and Their Influence
The neighbourhoods and communities teens live in also have an impact. Living in areas where substance use is common or where there’s visible crime can normalise risky behaviours and make teens more likely to use drugs or alcohol.
However, community-based initiatives, sports clubs, and structured extracurricular activities can shield adolescents, offering alternative pathways for social bonding and self-esteem development. Formal sports participation – as opposed to unstructured or informal gatherings – particularly stands out as a protective factor, creating an environment where effort, teamwork, and discipline are prioritised over substance use.
The Power of Prevention
Prevention is key to protecting teenagers from falling into substance use. “The most effective prevention programs target salient risk and protective factors at the individual, family, and/or community levels and are guided by relevant psychosocial theories regarding the etiology of substance use and abuse.” (Source: PMC) By addressing these factors, prevention efforts can make a meaningful difference in delaying or avoiding substance use altogether. Adolescents benefit most from interventions that involve their families, schools, and wider community, showing that a collaborative approach works best.
Helping Teens Make Healthier Choices
Protecting young people from the risks of drugs and alcohol isn’t just the job of parents or teachers—it’s something that requires everyone’s effort. Families, schools, and communities all need to play a role in creating safe environments and promoting positive behaviours. (See Reward & Rebellion – Making & Breaking Habits)
Here are a few ways to help teens say no to harmful substances:
- Build strong, supportive family relationships.
- Encourage teens to join sports, clubs, or other structured activities.
- Provide clear expectations and consequences around substance use.
- Teach decision-making skills and emotional control to help teens resist peer pressure.
Adolescence is a time when young people are figuring out who they are and what they want in life. By guiding them and giving them the tools to make healthy decisions, we can help them lead substance-free lives and reach their full potential.
When families, schools, and communities work together, we can protect young people and give them the support they need to make better, healthier choices. It’s a responsibility we all share, and the impact can last a lifetime. (Source: Springer Nature Link)
- Details
- Hits: 857
While policy makers debate the finer points of harm reduction versus prevention, and schools struggle to squeeze in a single hour of drug education between standardised tests, real kids are making real decisions about substance use with potentially lifelong consequences. The statistics paint a picture that should make us all uncomfortable: nearly two-thirds of 18-year-olds have tried alcohol, almost half have used marijuana, and a concerning number think It continues to both fascinate and disturb this team to note the pro-drug lobby’s ability to hijack that successful 1980’s JUST SAY NO campaign and malign it to the point where it is now a mocking meme. This new one-liner is supposed to make anyone who sets a solid health, safety and well-being boundary in the refusal to engage with psychotropic toxins – who exercises this most proactive of protective factors –– as somehow ‘stupid’.
However, what is stupid is allowing this pro-drug and resiliency undermining narrative to go unchecked, especially when we are urged, no, demanded to say NO to other psycho-social harms – We ‘must’ say NO to violence against woman, or NO to drug/drink driving and NO to Bullying or Crime etc… but NO to drug use, which is almost invariably involved in making the above issues worse, is mocked!
This short ‘heads up’ should jolt even the most brain-washed reader into understanding this ‘you can’t say no’ to drugs meme is an integral strategy in the war for drugs now being waged on our most vulnerable of citizens.
What it is time for, is an honest, evidence-based examination of what's actually happening to our kids' brains, bodies, and futures when they use substances during these critical developmental years. More importantly, it's time to ask some uncomfortable questions about why our prevention efforts look more like a game of whack-amole than a coherent strategy.
- Details
- Hits: 764
‘Drug checking’, just like pill testing, is premised on the demonstrably incorrect inference that most drug-related deaths are tied to either unknown purity of drugs bought from criminals, or deadly contaminants or other toxic drugs mixed in with such purchased drugs.
For decades now, the same parties now requesting substantial government funding for ‘drug checking’ have been pushing the same spurious misinformation.
Here are the direct words from ANCD Research Paper 1 – ‘Heroin Overdose’ coming from the Prime Minister’s own Australian National Council on Drugs (ANCD) in the year 2000. This paper was produced in the midst of Australia’s highest rates of opioid overdose.
On page xiii, under the heading ‘Purity’ the NDARC researchers assert,
“If overdose were a simple function of purity one would expect the blood morphine concentrations of fatal overdose victims to be significantly higher than living intoxicated heroin users. As described above, it has been found that many individuals who die of an opioid overdose have blood morphine concentrations at autopsy which are below the commonly accepted toxic dose. Studies that have investigated the relationship between the purity of street heroin seizures and fatality from overdose report a weak correlation, or no correlation, between heroin purity and fatality from overdose.”
Then on page xiv, under ‘Contaminants’ it reports,
“In general, studies outside the eastern United States do not report the detection of impurities in seized heroin. Adulterants found in Australian heroin samples are largely pharmacologically inactive dilutants (used to add bulk) or caffeine (believed to increase the bioavailability of heroin when smoked).”
We were speciously told for decades that it was the criminal sourcing of these drugs that led to so many deaths, even as equal numbers of opiate users were dying from pharmacologically pure Oxycodone and the like. But ‘drug checking’ is spinning the same narrative.
Drug Free Australia does not deny that criminal-manufactured pills with high potency opioids masquerading as lower potency opioids will cause some unexpected fatalities, but much more evidence is needed to show that these are anything but the tiny minority of fatalities.
Balanced against this are the massive number of opiate deaths caused by the harm reductionist messaging which teaches the ‘safe use of illicit drugs’, of which drug checking is seminally a part. This messaging quadrupled opiate deaths between 1984 (below 250 for 15-44 year olds) and 1,116 for 15-54 year olds in 1999. The prevention and rehabilitation priorities of Tough on Drugs made opiate deaths plummet by 67% (or a massive 750 opiate deaths per year), where they stayed for 7 years until a new Federal Government scrapped them. In the decade following, with the ‘safe use of drugs’ message again prioritised, opiate deaths skyrocketed 260% with other contributing polydrug-use illicit drug deaths increasing 210-590%. Harm Reduction’s ‘safe use of drugs’ ideology has very demonstrably added many, many thousands of opiate deaths to Australian mortality tolls and heavily weights any set of balances against a few lives saved by ‘drug checking’. Drug Free Australia has no problem with law enforcement continuing to publicise contaminants or adulterants in seized drugs, maintaining the message that drug use is not acceptable, rather than allowing drug-normalisating NGOs to take that role.
In case you missed our documents supporting the above paragraph last time we sent them, here they are once again for your information and edification.
Gary Christian
PRESIDENT
Drug Free Australia
0422 163 141
NSW Drug Summit 4 DFA handouts
- Details
- Hits: 872
Firstly, no credible individual on the planet concedes that recovery is better than prevention – However, prevention is always – always better than cure.
Three major demographics that must not only be considered but given highest priority in all drug policy and drug policy interpretations.
This better status of prevention is so because it considers and prioritises the following,
1. Citizens – Communities and their families
2. Children
3. Recovered and Recovering Alumni
- Details
- Hits: 817
Here's a sobering thought: While your average recreational substance user is busy defending their "harmless fun," approximately 8.7 million children in the United States alone are living in households where at least one parent struggles with substance use disorder. That's right – one in eight children under 17 are watching their childhood disappear into the bottom of someone else's bottle or going up in someone else's smoke. Let's cut through the haze and look at what the research actually tells us about this "recreational" activity's impact on the next generation.
For complete investigative article
- Profit Over Health: The Role of Industries in Drug Addiction
- Childhood maltreatment linked to greater cognitive difficulties than previously thought
- Substance Use & Family Violence: ‘Permission’ Policies vs the Rights of the Child
- Family connectedness, particularly at meal times – excellent protective factor