Drug Testing Your Teenager

The article/news story I chose to talk about for my eight blog was written by Lindsay Lyon of US News. This particular piece is titled, “5 Ways Teens Might Cheat on Drug Tests—and How to Catch them”. Along with this article/new story there are other stories regarding the same situation of teenagers and drug abuse, including, “7 Reasons Parents Should Not Test Kids for Drug Use”. All of these articles are obviously useful to parents when it comes to their children/teenagers/loved ones, etc.

As stated by the article/ news story,

“Google "beat drug test," and the search engine spits out page upon page of ploys and products that can make incriminating urine seem drug free. All it takes is a computer-savvy teen to access them.”

The main point of the article is obviously discussing the 5 main different ways children my cheat on drug test. The five main ways are; tampering, water-loading, switching drugs, popping vitamins, and swapping urine samples. In my eyes, it is just so sad that it has come to teenagers having to think and do these sorts of things to pass a drug test. Just from personal experience of course, as a teenager I could never imagine such things even going through my mind. It just goes to show you how big of a social problem this really is.

To add on this particular social problem discussed in the article/news story. Even though two of the sources they gathered information were from places such as Washington DC and Texas, this social problem is obviously something that exist all over our country as well. Also, it was written in 2008 but clearly still a social problem to this day. Some of examples of sources the article/ news story used were; president of the Institute for Behavior and Health Inc./former director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Robert DuPont and a toxicologist of the University of Texas-Houston medical school, Amitava Dasgupta. A week before this article/ news story was published, the American Association for Clinical Chemistry's annual meeting was held in Washington, D.C. Throughout the meeting they discussed how adults had all these different ways of cheating on their drug tests for work, and therefore it enabled teenagers even more to try and do the same things.

In conclusion, even though I was aware drug testing with teenagers was a significant social problem, this article helped me realize even more. To do our best to solve these issues, I think the first step would definitely have to be talking to our children/future children and drug related issues more and more. In my eyes, I feel is always best to have the parent/child relationship where the child feels safe talking to their mother/father about just about anything and everything. After reading this article and seeing even more the significance of this social problem, I definitely have made a pledge to myself to take any steps I can to help prevent these types of issues.