It goes without saying that adolescents shouldn’t use alcohol or illicit drugs. Both activities are illegal and dangerous to adolescents’ health and safety. Still, by the time they reach their senior year of high school, 71 percent of adolescents have tried alcohol and nearly half have tried an illicit drug at least once.1,2 Although not all of the adolescents who try or use alcohol and drugs will develop an addiction, some will. In fact, more than one in 10 (12.5 percent) of youth ages 18 to 20 have an alcohol dependence, the highest rate of any age group.
September is National Recovery Month, a time to spread the positive message to adults involved with adolescents that strategies to prevent substance use work, that treatment can help, and that young people can and do recover. The best way for adolescents to avoid addiction is to never use alcohol or drugs. However, if an adolescent does develop an addiction, early intervention can help them to avoid carrying that problem into adulthood.
Alcohol and Illicit Drug Use in Adolescence
The most common and harmful form of alcohol use among all adolescents is “binge drinking” (having four or more drinks for women and five or more drinks for men within a couple of hours). Although the percentage of high school students who binge drink has declined in recent years, about one in four high school seniors surveyed in 2010 had binged within the past 30 days of the time the survey was taken.
In terms of illicit drug use, marijuana is the drug tried and used most often by adolescents, followed by prescription drugs without medical supervision, and then by inhalants and hallucinogens. After years of declining use, adolescents increased their use of marijuana between the mid-2000’s and 2010.6
Two federal initiatives have set goals and specific targets for preventing and reducing alcohol and illicit drug use in adolescence: the U.S. National Prevention Strategy (a comprehensive plan to increase the number of Americans who are healthy at every stage of life) and Healthy People 2020 (the federal government’s 10-year health agenda). Specifically, efforts are focused on reducing the number of high school seniors who have engaged in binge drinking and on reducing the number of adolescents, ages 12 to 17, who have used an illicit drug in the last 30 days.
Adolescents, Dependence, and Addiction Treatment
Several factors influence whether an adolescent will develop an addiction to alcohol or illicit drugs. These include genetics (for example, whether their parents had a substance abuse problem), as well as the age that they start using alcohol or illicit drugs (the earlier in life they use substances, the higher their chances are of addiction).
In a positive trend, the percentage of adolescents identified as having a substance dependency declined between
