Teens and drugs in modernized India
Empowering adolescents needs to start with strengthening families.
The News Story: Empowering Adolescents
India has been modernizing rapidly of late, and with that modernization comes the usual host of problems—including substance abuse and sexually transmitted diseases. To deal with these problems, the Hindustan Times reports, more than 150,000 teenagers across the country are being trained as “peer mentors” to discuss “reproductive and sexual health, substance abuse and mental health among other issues concerning their age.”
To aid in this effort, the Indian health ministry recently released a special “resource kit,” a backpack holding information “specially designed by experts to help peer educators, especially in villages, discuss sensitive issues and answer teenage queries in their community in an informed manner.” The program will address six specific areas of particular concern for adolescents: “nutrition, sexual and reproductive health, non-communicable diseases, substance misuse, injuries and violence (including gender-based violence) and mental health.”
But research indicates that there may be much, much more to addressing adolescent health than backpacks and notebooks. With rapid urbanization and modernization, India has also been wrestling with challenges to its historically strong family system. And with these challenges, come many others.
(Sources: Rhythma Kaul, “Empowering adolescents: India launches Saathiya resource kit,” Hindustan Times, February 20, 2017.)
The New Research: Separated Parents, Substance-Abusing Progeny
Conducted by scholars at Yale, Washington, and Indiana Universities in the United States and King’s College in England, a new study analyzes data on substance use during early adolescence among 4,163 female twins born between 1975 and 1985 in the state of Missouri. The researchers focus on substance use among young adolescents first because such use is already disturbingly prevalent in the United States and second because such early-adolescent use portends malign life trajectories. What they discover, unsurprisingly, is that teens become much more at risk for developing substance abuse problems when their parents separate.
The researchers cite recent investigations finding that a third (33%) of American 8th-graders have used alcohol, almost one-fifth (19%) have used cigarettes, and almost one-sixth (16%) have used marijuana. By indulging in the use of these substances, the researchers warn, these young adolescents expose themselves to “immediate risks of harm, such as unintentional accidents, sexual risk-taking, and other victimization.” What is more, early use of alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana predicts “initiation and escalation in use of harder substances.”
Careful parsing of the data highlights two particularly salient risk factors for early-adolescent substance use: 1) having alcoholic parents, and 2) having separated parents. These two risk factors stand out clearly in the data for adolescents of “European or other Ancestry (EA).” Unsurprisingly, among young adolescents of European and other ancestry, the perfect storm of substance abuse occurs when such youth have alcoholic parents who are separated. The international team of scholars who wrote this study reports that “E[uropean and other] A[ncestry] twins from alcoholic separated families were at highest risk of early alcohol, tobacco, cannabis [marijuana] and other illicit substance involvement, compared to twins from nonalcoholic intact families.” The combination of parental alcoholism and parental separation indeed raised the risk of substance use dramatically. The researchers calculate that among young adolescents in the study whose parents were both alcoholic and separated, the likelihood of their ever having been intoxicated with alcohol by the age of 10 ran a phenomenal 33 times higher than among peers whose parents were neither alcoholic nor separated. When the researchers raised the threshold age from 10 to 14, adolescents with parents who were alcoholic and separated were still three and a half times more likely to have been intoxicated with alcohol than peers whose parents were neither alcoholic nor separated.
Similar patterns prevailed when the researchers shifted their focus to tobacco use. Young adolescents with parents who were both alcoholic and separated were almost 11 times more likely to smoke regularly by age 10 than were those with parents who were neither. Re-setting the threshold age at 14, the researchers calculate that young adolescents with parents who were alcoholic and separated were four and a half times more likely to smoke regularly than peers with parents who were neither.
The likelihood that a young adolescent will use marijuana is similarly dependent on family circumstances. The researchers report that young adolescents whose parents are both alcoholic and separated are almost six times as likely to use marijuana by age 14 than peers whose parents are neither.
Predictably, living with alcoholic parents increases the likelihood of substance abuse even when those parents are not separated. But distinctively high vulnerability shows up among young adolescents whose parents are not alcoholic but are separated. “Effects of parental separation absent of parental alcoholism were . . . observed,” report the researchers, noting that these effects are notable “particularly for smoking and use of cannabis or other illicit drugs.”
Taking as their comparative standard young adolescents with nonalcoholic parents who were in intact marriages, the researchers calculate that young adolescents in their study from nonalcoholic families in which the parents were separated were “at nearly three times increased likelihood of smoking before age 11, and nearly two times increased likelihood over ages 11-14.” Using the same standard of comparison, the researchers find that young adolescents with nonalcoholic but separated parents manifested “over two times increased likelihood of regular smoking and cannabis [marijuana] use” through age 14. The researchers limn the same pattern for use of other illicit drugs, concluding that young adolescents with nonalcoholic but separated parents were almost four times more likely to use such drugs by age 15 and almost two times more likely to use these substances from that age onward than were peers whose nonalcoholic parents were in an intact marriage.
The researchers stress that even in the absence of parental alcoholism, the effects of parental separation on young adolescents’ substance abuse persist—albeit with “somewhat attenuated” strength—in statistical models that take into account “family background, offspring pathology, and childhood risk-factors.”
In short, the researchers find that “parental separation predicts early substance involvement that is not explained by parental alcoholism nor associated family background characteristics.”
Surely, researchers who declare that they seek “targeted substance abuse prevention” can see that such prevention should start with finding ways to keep parents not only sober but also sober together.
(Source: Bryce Christensen and Nicole M. King, “New Research,” The Family in America 29.3 [Summer 2015]. Study: Mary Waldron et al., “Risks for Early Substance Involvement Associated with Parental Alcoholism and Parental Separation in an Adolescent Female Cohort,” Drug and Alcohol Dependence 138[2014]: 130-6.)
Nicole M. King is the Managing Editor of The Family in America. Republished from The Family in America, a MercatorNet partner site, with permission.
If you can tear yourself away from The Adventures of Donald Trump for a few minutes, our lead article looks at the political situation in France, where there are presidential elections next month. The writer, Ronnie Smith, is an Englishman living at present in Languedoc (a good swap, I would say), which makes him close enough to the action but emotionally far enough away to attempt an ironic assessment of the prospects of the main candidates.
Of course, few of us would care very much about that if it weren’t for the rising popularity of the Trumpish Marine Le Pen, who, as Ross Douthat of the New York Times concurs, has a chance of winning the presidency. Her opposite number is another outsider, which could make the whole thing very exciting.
On a different note: A week ago I wrote about a crisis in a pregnancy here in Auckland where the baby had had surgery for spina bifida in utero. I am happy to say that baby Benjamin was safely delivered yesterday at 33 weeks and things are looking hopeful. Further updates to come.
Carolyn Moynihan
Deputy Editor,
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Teens and drugs in modernized India
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