Learning About Drugs

Nurses can learn about teen usage of drugs from three major annual studies:

• The Partnership Attitude Tracking Study 6,
• The Monitoring the Future Study 3, and the
• National Household Survey on Drug Abuse 7.

Sources of information about drugs for teens are, in order of prevalence:

• school,
• parents
• friends,
• the media and
• the Internet.6
  

Rolling Stone Magazine published a comprehensive special issue on street drugs in 1994 and Time Magazine has had full articles about Ecstasy in the past few years. 8,9,10 Web sites that discourage and support drug use are both available and teen investigation into these sites has increased 38% since 1998. 6 The Vaults of Erowid is one popular site containing an encyclopedic volume of information.11

Please visit The Vaults of Erowid. You can browse their volumes of information, but please be sure to take a look at the Heroin information, specifically the article: Contaminant in some Heroin Destroys Brain and Kills. Be prepared to answer the question:

What is the name of the condition this contaminant is causing, and what are the symptoms?