Teen substance abuse: Health effects can go beyond a feeling of being wasted
Published: Monday, October 1, 2007 | 1:09 PM ET
Canadian Press: THE CANADIAN PRESS
For Wade Cory, it started with a glass of vodka, swiped from a bottle hidden away in his best friend's kitchen.
"I started drinking when I was in Grade 6 or 7," says Cory, now 21 and a counsellor at the Alberta Adolescent Recovery Centre in Calgary. "It was pretty social at the beginning and then around Grade 9, I found marijuana. That was my favourite drug of all time, and started using that. It started out just on weekends and at parties."
Wade Cory, 21, a counselor at the Alberta Adolescent Recovery Centre in Calgary, is a recovered substance abuser who uses his experiences to help others trying to get over their addictions. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh High school life was good. His marks were fine and he was captain of the football team.
But then his grades started to slip, he failed Grade 10 Science and everything started to revolve around his "obsession" with drugs and alcohol.
"Ever since Grade 10 when I really started using weed, and then I went on to (magic) mushrooms and stuff like that, and dextrin, like prescription pills - it was just I thought about that more than anything else I'd ever thought about. I really loved sports, I really loved school, I loved friends, but all that became secondary to marijuana and drinking."
Cory's story is a familiar one to doctors who work with teen users and abusers.
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Dr. Karen Leslie, a staff pediatrician at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, said the top two problematic drugs for this demographic are alcohol and cannabis.
"Particularly kids who are using marijuana on a regular basis because that really seems to interfere a lot with their schooling, with all kinds of things in their life," she said.
"We see lots and lots of kids with sleep problems, and then they end up using cannabis to try to get to sleep, and then it becomes something that they're dependent on."
People who are dependent might be using several times a day, she noted.
"And that definitely affects both things like reaction time, if they're driving; it can affect motivation. We know there's a link between psychosis and cannabis. There are lung concerns in terms of respiratory effect. So certainly, cannabis use is quite concerning."
The federal government has expressed concerns, too. It plans to announce an anti-drug strategy this week that is expected to combine treatment and prevention programs with stiffer penalties for illicit drug use.
Dr. Mark Norris, a pediatrician and adolescent health consultant at the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario, said he often sees substance abusers who engage in higher-risk activities.
"One patient I'm thinking of in particular was under the influence of both alcohol and cannabis and dove into a shallow pond and ended up sustaining soft tissue injuries," he said from Ottawa.
"The potential there is quite significant . . . she could have sustained a much more serious injury. And I've personally over the last year seen lots of different instances where people show up with different types of injuries, whether it's falling out of trees, people that are riding motor vehicles or ATVs that have accidents, etc. So the range is quite wide."
In Cory's case, he stole his parents' vehicle on a school day and went joy riding with friends. He got a speeding ticket, a suspension from school and was in and out of treatment programs for the next while.
"I was fully in chaos in my life and I never thought that drugs and alcohol was the problem," he said. "I always thought something else was the problem: my parents were too controlling or the teacher was wrong."
A "six-day bender" that involved prescription pills, booze and marijuana brought everything to a head. He broke into his parents' house, nabbing items that he pawned off for money.
But on his next trip home, his parents weren't there, he had nowhere to go, no friends left, no drugs, no money, no job, he said.
"I came home and there were bars on the window, keeping me out."
Later, his mother managed to get him to a hospital.
"Emergency said I shouldn't be alive just because of how many drugs I had in my system," he said. "They put me in the psych ward and that's where I stayed for a week."
"That's where it came to me: 'What am I doing with my life?"'
Now that he's had his "moment of clarity" and intensive treatment at the centre where he now works as a counsellor, he said parents need to realize that drug addicts and alcoholics "can lie pretty good."
"I fought my parents tooth and nail that it wasn't alcohol and drugs, and it was everything else. I lied to them. I would do anything to keep my drugs and alcohol around me, even if it was ruining my life."
Besides alcohol and marijuana, Leslie said she's concerned about the amount of cocaine use she's been seeing.
"Cocaine is a really, really powerful drug and certainly the young people I've seen who have been using cocaine on a regular basis have really needed very intensive treatment," she said. "When they stop using it, or if they just use it on a weekend, then they get this kind of post-use depression, similar to what you see in kids who use ecstasy."
She said there's a risk of serious medical problems: "Heart complications, high blood pressure complications, there are potential brain complications from having high blood pressure, abnormal heart rhythms from using cocaine."
There are various signs of substance abuse that parents can watch for, experts agree.
Leslie said changes in behaviour and school performance - truancy, a drop in marks or changes in hygiene - could signal a problem.
"Weight loss is a big one in kids who start using a lot of cocaine because it's a stimulant and it's an appetite suppressant, so we've certainly seen kids who've lost large, large amounts of weight as a result of using cannabis and methamphetamine and the other stimulant drugs," she added.
Norris said other effects of substance abuse can include changes in mood, depression, anxiety and a risk of self-harm. In addition, a proportion of his patients engage in fairly high-risk sexual behaviour while under the influence, he said.
"I have absolutely had patients that have presented with sexually transmitted infections (after) having sexual relations under the influence . . . of one or more drugs."
Leslie also noted that ecstasy tablets often look appealing to teens - for instance, they might be stamped with a cartoon character.
But she warned "there is no quality control with any of these," and an analysis of tablets several years ago in London found a huge proportion of what was in the tablets was not MDMA (methylenedioxymethamphetamine).
"A lot of it is word of mouth. 'I've used this one, it was OK' or 'My friend used this tablet, this pink one, so I think it's OK.' That's the bar they're using to assess quality . . . you never know what's in it."
Cory, meanwhile, has finished school, plays hockey with his co-workers at the recovery centre, goes on vacations with other "sober" friends and hasn't had a drink or taken drugs in four years.
"I know there's a solution out there, and I think a lot of people have no idea, absolutely no idea what's going on in a kid's mind when he's a drug addict," he said.
"It's pretty much unbelievable how much my life has done a 180, and just totally went the other way, I think, around family. What it's made me be able to do is just be a normal person in society, no better or less than anybody else, but I can be part of the society now."
