The opioid crisis hasn’t escaped anyone’s attention, including the youth. Thankfully, it seems they are reacting against rather than for the drugs.
According to data from the National Institutes of Health, 0.6% of high school seniors reported using narcotics other than heroin in the past year. The number has been on the decline since a relative high of 1.7% in 2022 and on overall decline since an all-time high of 9.5% in 2004.
At the same time, the United States continues to experience an upward-trending epidemic. Washington, D.C., has the highest rate of drug overdose deaths in the country and trails just behind West Virginia in opioid overdose deaths, specifically.
The modern opioid crisis has been a reality for decades, as different natural and synthetic drugs have found an unfortunately reliable clientele. Recently, overdose deaths from synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl, shot up around 2014 and sharply did so again from 2019 to 2022. After Oregon’s four-year experiment in decriminalizing hard drugs, the state recriminalized them this past April.
On the flip side of that is the record low use of narcotics among teenagers: Consistent decreases since the early 2010s and another sharp drop after a 2022 spike.
It may not be too far off to consider that these teenagers’ choices reflect their surroundings. In the midst of a raging epidemic, the youth are, in large part, straying from the abundance of hard drugs. Either they are scared off by what they see and hear, or educational resources are working.
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Something similar is evident in the same data from earlier decades. After a relative high in 1985 of 5.9% of teenagers using narcotics other than heroin, the number decreased generally until a low of 3.3% in 1992. After that year, drug use returned to a steady increase. The same time period saw a nationwide crack epidemic that took up the whole of the 1980s and early years of the 1990s.
Maybe this age-group difference is little more than availability, or perhaps the pattern is worth investigating. At the current stage of the modern opioid crisis, it is at least a very promising result.