When you are young, you shape your possibilities. Research
in psychology and neuroscience shows us that your personality and your
intelligence develop during childhood and teenage years until becoming fully
developed by age 25. Likewise, during your younger years, you write the story
you tell about yourself – who are you, how do you understand your worth and your
potential? Then you live this story through your adult life. In other words,
the person you shape while growing up can be the person you’re stuck with. So allowing
drugs or alcohol to influence this young person can affect not just who you are
today, but who you can be and will become. Here are five reasons why substance
abuse is especially dangerous for young people.
1. Damage to the
Developing Brain
The brain you are born with is not necessarily the same
brain you bring into adulthood. Between these two events – birth and about age
25 – your brain is developing to meet the needs of your environment. How you
are parented, intellectual challenges, your nutrition and many more things influence
how parts of your brain develop during this time. Substances of abuse can
change or stop this development.
A
review in the journal Alcoholism:
Clinical&Experimental Research collects what we know about how,
exactly, alcohol influences the developing brain. The review writes that brain
areas “actively developing during adolescence include the
prefrontal cortex, limbic system areas, and white matter myelin. These areas
serving cognitive, behavioral, and emotional regulation may be particularly
vulnerable to adverse alcohol effects.”
Specifically, the prefrontal cortex controls complex
decision-making and the “executive function” activities of reasoning, planning
and willpower; the limbic system controls emotion, motivation and emotional
learning; and white matter myelin is the coating of insulation that allows
electrical signals to travel efficiently throughout the brain (and which breaks
down in Alzheimer’s disease). Together, impacts on the development of these
systems can lead to impulsivity, sensation-seeking and slower cognitive
function.
2. Risk of Addiction
According to the National Council on
Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, people who start drinking before age 15 are
five times more likely to develop alcohol abuse and dependence than people who
start after age 21. Part of this, again, is due to the structure and function
of the adolescent brain. Basically, the teen brain craves new experiences. It
is wired to be impulsive. For most people, this is a transitional period – you
are impulsive in your youth and then learn moderation as you age. Of course,
impulsivity makes teenagers more likely to experiment with substances of abuse.
And, unfortunately, as this
article in the American Journal of
Psychiatry shows, teens who abuse substances can get stuck in this
developmental period of impulsivity. When a young person uses drugs or alcohol,
it can embalm him or her in a state of readiness for more drugs and alcohol.
The younger you start using, the more serious the problem is likely to become
(and the more likely the problem will become serious).
3. Long-Term Health Risk
Here’s the obvious part: the longer you subject your body to
substances of abuse, the more likely you are to eventually experience health
consequences like cardiovascular disease, dementia and even cancer. The earlier
you start, the more years you have available for substance abuse, and the more
likely these substances are to eventually start “breaking down” the body systems they affect. But
in addition to this traditional view of accumulated risk, new evidence shows
that substances may be more harmful to young bodies than to developed bodies.
Basically, young bodies aren’t ready to handle the challenge of substances. For
example, this study
shows that younger people who drink heavily are even more likely than older
people who drink similar amounts for similar durations to experience cirrhosis
of the liver.
4. Behavioral Health
Risk
Health risks associated with teen and young-adult substance
use aren’t limited to the direct effects of the substances themselves. Risk
also comes from the behaviors of
young people who use substances. According to the NCADD fact sheet Facts About Underage Drinking (paid
download here), “Each
year, approximately 5,000 young people
under the age of 21 die as a result of underage drinking. This
includes about 1,900 deaths from motor vehicle crashes, 1,600 as a result of
homicides, 300 from suicide, and hundreds from other injuries such as falls,
burns, and drownings. And, approximately 600,000 college students are
unintentionally injured while under the influence of alcohol.
Approximately 700,000 students are assaulted by other students who have been
drinking and about 100,000 students are victims of alcohol-related sexual
assault or date rape.”
Substances
are dangerous. They can also make you dangerous
to yourself or to others.
5. Social Development
Just as physical development is in overdrive during teenage
and young adult years, social development is in high gear as well. According to
the psychologist Erik Erikson, the primary developmental challenge of young
adulthood is to resolve the conflict of intimacy
versus isolation – can you give away some independence to form a close
relationship with a partner? Erikson saw the ability to form these bonds as
essential to the path of human development that leads later to productivity in
middle age and integrity as an older person. As long as substance abuse blocks
the potential for intimacy, a young person will remain stuck in their personal
and social development. Similar is true of career; what you do as a young
person defines much of your potential later in life.
The foundation for successful relationships and careers is
laid during young adulthood. And these two social stepping-stones in turn lay
the foundation for wellbeing in later life. If this critical period is instead
spent with substances of abuse, young people can miss these important
milestones in their social development.
In young adulthood, life paths diverge – some paths point
toward wellbeing, intimacy, security and success; others point toward struggle,
declining health, and isolation. Substance abuse at any age can be devastating
to mind, body and spirit, but especially when young, addiction or dependence
can define the direction of your future life path. Which path will you choose?
The choices you make when young can help define who you will be for the rest of
your life.
***
Richard Taite is founder and CEO of Cliffside Malibu,
offering evidence-based, individualized addiction treatment based on the Stages
of Change model. He is also coauthor with Dr. Constance Scharff
of the book Ending
Addiction for Good.
