The number one drug of choice for teenagers on the Coast may surprise you. It's not ecstasy or meth or LSD or marijuana, although all are available on the Coast. Most teens are reaching for a bottle of alcohol and drinking until they pass out.
"Binge drinking is really the issue I try to bang home to the kids as often as possible," said Sheena Campbell, co-ordinator of school-based prevention with Vancouver Coastal Health Addiction Services. "That's the dangerous kind of drinking and that rate has remained constant since 1998."
Campbell referred to numbers from the McCreary Centre Society study that polls teens in B.C. aged 13 to 18 every three years for their input on drug and alcohol use. The study's results were shared during a substance abuse talk with concerned parents who met at Sechelt Elementary School on Tuesday, Feb. 15.
Binge drinking was clearly at the top of the list of substance abuse among local youth.
"About 45 per cent of them are binge drinking when they drink," she said. "Binge drinking is drinking a whole bunch really fast, which is what teenagers do," she said, adding some teens who think they have been slipped the date rape drug at a party have actually drank themselves unconscious.
She believes alcohol is the worst drug of choice for teens.
"The kids ask me every time I do a presentation somewhere, 'what's the worst drug?' Alcohol's the worst drug. All of our information is the damage that it does to your body, the cancer rates, the violence that it produces, the drunk driving accidents, fighting - those kinds of injuries and accidents are generally alcohol-fuelled," she said. "You don't see that so much with marijuana. Marijuana has a whole other set of problems that we can talk about, but alcohol is really a problem."
She said the best way to keep teens from binge drinking is to talk with them about alcohol, set clear expectations, and watch parental drinking habits closely and change them when necessary.
"The piece that you might not want to hear is that they are watching you, so you have to think, have they ever heard you turn down a drink?" she asked, encouraging parents to examine their own behaviour when it comes to alcohol.
During Campbell's talk she said marijuana is still a drug of choice for some of our teens, although the rate of use has dropped from 38 per cent to 30 per cent in the most recent McCreary study numbers. She sees the drop as positive and says she doesn't think marijuana is as big a problem for Coast youth as alcohol, but notes marijuana is the number two choice for teens.
"On the Coast we need to be most concerned about alcohol and marijuana. They are the most prevalent," she said. "The other issue of concern is prescription drug use. Using other people's prescriptions. That's more than doubled in the past five years, so 15 per cent of kids are now reporting that they use other people's medications to get high.
"So Percocet, OxyContin, any kind of heavy duty pain killer that you might have in your medicine cabinet left over - get rid of them."
Campbell said all teens will likely experiment with something, and making sure there are clear boundaries and expectations from the start can help avoid substance abuse problems in the future.
"We want to make sure our kids, if they don't avoid drugs and alcohol altogether, wait as long as possible before they start experimenting," she said. "Experimentation is a stage of their development. They're curious about lots of things, they're experimenting with lots of things. Makeup, fashion, new hairstyles, new friends - everything is new - and that's what they're after is that kind of experimentation, so it's important that we as parents maintain a real clear set of expectations."
If you are struggling with a child who is currently using drugs or alcohol, you can contact addiction services at 604-741-7338 for more help and support.
