Archive for the ‘Drugs’ Category

Middle-Class Children and Alcohol

April 15, 2012


Long thought to be a largely lower socio-economic problem, alcohol abuse seems very much alive and well among middle-class children. This presents a very gloomy picture for what the future has to offer.

More than one in three of those born in professional households had downed a full glass before reaching their teenage years, the statistics show.

The 35 per cent figure among the middle classes is almost twice the level found among 12-year-olds across all economic groups.

Experts said that most children who had drunk alcohol at such a young age were getting it from their own homes.

While some were secretly raiding well-stocked drinks cabinets, many more were being allowed to drink by parents who believed that it would help them to develop more mature attitudes towards alcohol.

The Ipsos Mori poll for charity Drinkaware, which is funded by the alcohol industry to promote sensible drinking, surveyed more than 500 parents from the social groups ABC1 and their children, aged between 10 and 17.

This also reminds us that we are not doing nearly enough to remedy the problem.

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Student Finds a Bag of Cocaine in Her Amazon Textbook Order

January 29, 2012

Cocaine isn’t something you’d expect to find in your Amazon textbook order. For one unsuspecting customer, a university textbook about terrorism isn’t the only thing she received in the mail.

Any university student who has ever purchased a used textbook knows that there are sometimes strange surprises hiding between those pages. Usually they come in the form of messy scribbles or perhaps even a forgotten piece of gum, but in one student’s case the unexpected (and unwanted) gift-with-a-textbook-purchase was a bag of cocaine.

WPTV reports that Sophia Stockton — a junior at Mid-America Nazarene University in Olathe, Kansas — recently ordered a textbook from an independent retailer through the Amazon online storefront. The book was intended for a spring course on terrorism and is called “Understanding Terrorism: Challenges, Perspectives and Issues.”

When Stockton flipped through the textbook, she “discovered a bag of white powder had fallen to the ground.” According to WPTV, Stockton feared that the bag contained anthrax and took it to the local police department the next day:

“I told them white powder was in my terrorism textbook and so I put it on the table and they’re like, ‘oh, okay,’ And so he went back and tested it,” Stockton recalls. “ He comes back and says, ‘you didn’t happen to order some cocaine with your textbook, did you?’ And I was like, no!”

This is certainly not the best method of getting disillusioned kids back into reading.

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Study: Clever Children More Likely to End Up On Drugs

November 15, 2011

There have been a lot of studies recently where the findings were so obvious you wondered how they managed to get a research grant for it in the first place.But every so often you stumble upon a study where the findings were not as you might have predicted.

A recent study that found that clever children are more likely to use drugs surprised me greatly:

Intelligent girls and boys are much more likely than average to take illegal drugs like cocaine, cannabis and ecstasy when they grow up, a study has found.

Scientists think they do so in part as a “coping strategy” to avoid bullying from their peers, and partially because they find life boring.

The effect is more pronounced in girls than boys, with those exhibiting high IQs as children more than twice as likely to have tried cocaine or cannabis by the age of 30, as those of lower intelligence.

The effect in boys with high IQs is also marked, with them being around 50 per cent more likely to have done so by that age as their less intelligent former classmates.

A team at Cardiff University analysed data from almost 8,000 people born in one week in April 1970, who were enrolled at birth in the ongoing British Cohort Study, which follows participants through life. All these children had their IQs tested between the age of five and 10.

Drug use, as reported by the participants themselves, was then recorded at 16 and 30 years of age.

At 16, 7.0 per cent of boys and 6.3 per cent of girls had used cannabis. This minority had “statistically significant higher mean childhood IQ scores” than non-users, according to the authors of the report, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

The authors noted: “Across most drugs (except amphetamine in men), men and women who reported using in the past 12 months had a significantly higher childhood IQ score than those who reported no use.”

They concluded: “High childhood IQ may increase the risk of substance abuse in early adulthood.”

Well that explains it – no wonder why I’ve never taken drugs!

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