What Hong Kong parents can do to flag drug and alcohol risks to children
A counsellor offers tips on how to broach the subject of addiction with your offspring without alienating them
My 14-year-old daughter came home past midnight last weekend, smelling of alcohol and something else. My husband thought it was pot, and said it was normal to experiment with drugs and alcohol at her age. But I am worried she will become addicted to drugs.
It must be a horrifying experience, especially if your husband and you are not on the same page regarding drug use. Rather than go into the social and psychological ramifications of addiction in this short article, I’ll highlight some advances in neuroscience addiction research to illuminate the problem you are facing. In a city where, Dr Mark Gandolfi, head of St John’s Counselling Centre, reckons drugs and alcohol are “available, accessible and affordable”, your daughter needs you to make joint and informed decisions together to protect her from harmful involvement with drugs.
As Dr Nora Volkow, director of the US National Institute on Drug Abuse, has pointed out, people need accurate information about drugs, especially when marijuana is sometimes regarded as a safe drug. You should research or seek professional advice on the following:
the “gateway hypothesis”, how teenagers who use one drug move on to other drugs;
how marijuana’s potency has increased in the past few decades;
the harmful effect of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the main active ingredient in marijuana, and how it alters nerve receptor function; and
the addictive properties of abusable drugs and their toxic effects (drop in IQ, increased risk of developing psychosis in adulthood, decrease in short-term memory, etc.) on the developing brain.
Professional advice on addiction might be the best way forward. Books such as Addiction Inbox and The Chemical Carousel by Dirk Hanson are packed with information on addiction and medical research, but easy to read.
If there is a correlation between the number of calls we get for help and the number of arrests for drugs among teenagers, then there seems to be an increase in drug use in Hong Kong in the past few months.