Continued research on High School Substance abuse

The first article that I found today was from the website http://www.teendrugabuse.us/drugsnschool.html and addressed both the issues of Marijuana use and alcohol use in teens in school. The article gave clear, articulate, and on-sided information about Marijuana usage and the effects that it has on high school students. The article talked about how "The use of marijuana by teens can affect school, sports, and other activities; marijuana also affects memory, judgment, and perception. Teens who smoke marijuana on a regular basis start to lose interest in their appearance and how they are doing in school, at work, and at home." This article also gave information about the immediate effects of Marijuana so that parents can recognize them if their child comes home and appears to have smoked pot. This website also gave statistics of how many students starting in the 8th grade smoked Marijuana. These statistics are credible because this article is a compilation of findings from organizations like the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse. The alcohol section of this article was just as informative and even better because it gave specific stats of dangerous situations people confront while under the influence of alcohol. Things like: Drunk driving, suicide, sexual assault, and high-risk sex. These things are dangerous for anyone under the influence, but more so for teens because of the lack of full brain development. This part of the article gave facts from the US government studies as well as the British government studies about how teens who drink alcohol have stunted brain development and lose vital brain functions. "The alcohol-dependent youth had greater difficulty remembering words and simple geometric designs after a 10-minute interval." The article made reference to a British article called: "Alcohol and Young People" published by the British Medical Association, I decided to check it out because is shows that teen drinking is not only an issue in America. http://www.bma.org.uk/images/undertheinfluence_tcm41-190062.pdf part of this article addressed the rising numbers of young people who are drinking and intentionally getting drunk, this article also talks about how the vast amount of alcohol advertising has had an affect on the numbers of teens drinking.
The purpose of my research today was to look into effects of alcohol and Marijuana usage on teens. While doing this I stumbled upon how alcohol miss use among teens is also an issue in Britain.

Issues Final Project: Substance Abuse in High School

For my final project in Issues I will be looking closer into the topic of substance abuse in high school. The main substances that I will be focusing on are the two major ones the have affected a good majority of high school students in one way or another: Drinking and Marijuana usage. These two substances are the most abused by high school students and most people have had experiences with both of these substances. What I intend to research is the statistics that go along with these substances: like amount who use or have tried these substances, deaths, penalties, what can be done to lower amount who use, and so on. This topic has intrigued me because as a high school student I can connect with it more so than I can with a topic about revolts overseas.  
I began my research by going to http://www.abovetheinfluence.com/ which is one of the most recognizable organizations that combat substance abuse in teens. The above the influence website gave detail descriptions of what Marijuana and alcohol contain and what the negative side affects are (but others may see as good.) This website had great information, but obviously was extremely biased.
I also looked at the website http://journals.lww.com/journaladdictionmedicine/Fulltext/2011/03000/Gender_Differences_in_Adolescent_Marijuana_Use_and.10.aspx which contained in ti an article with a detailed study on Connecticut high schoolers and their thoughts and uses of Marijuana. It stated that out of 4523 adolescents that 1655 participants (40.4%) endorsed lifetime marijuana use and 1004 participants (24.5%) endorsed past 30-day use (participants could be members of both the lifetime and past 30-day marijuana use groups); 2442 participants (59.6%) denied lifetime marijuana use. This website broke down and analyzed different reasons as to why someone would use Marijuana and who is more likely to smoke pot. This entry also went into the long term affects of Marijuana on adolescents.
As I continue my research I want to include the affects of legalization and lowering of drinking age limit to see if at all this could affect the amount of kids who abuse these substances.