In recent years, the volume of consumption has gone up while the age at which serious drinking starts has gone down. More and more kids are seeing alcohol and drugs as a form of recreation and one estimate suggests that the incidence of alcohol-related psychoses among children has grown by more than 15 times during the 1990s. Drug use is also way up, including among teens. One estimate indicates that between 25% and 33% of young people are regular drug users. The newer users come from relatively well-off families including 75% from families where both parents are present and where parents are professionals -- engineers, teachers, scientists etc.
Indeed. The Krokodil thing is alarming. And now we also have "bath salts" cannibals and young people dying from smoking legal fake "marijuana", aka Spice.
Get your facts right. That whole bath salts cannibal crap is hype. That dude was found to only have THC in his system. Get your bulldinky in order there, chief.
There's a huge difference between drug use and drug abuse. In the U.S. about 70% of the population drinks alcohol, but clearly we're not a nation full of alcoholics. Conflating drug use and drug abuse is counter-productive in fostering a culture of responsible drug use and promoting harm-reduction. It's that kind of attitude that causes people to reason that it's better to throw people in jail than to allow them to continue to use drugs recreationally.
Pursuing a policy of complete drug-abstinence is not only futile, but it hurts society. Prohibition increases crime as well as the risks to drug users, due to both the introduction of unregulated black market drugs as well as the suppression of information that could be used to educate users.
Ignoring the use of alcohol (which is a drug, despite what many people believe), Benjamin Franklin, Edgar Allen Poe, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, the Beatles, Francis Crick, and many other influential figures have all lead very successful and productive lives despite using drugs which are illegal today.
Then there's drug availability and actual drug use, which intrigues me most of all. Did you know that cannabis used to grow wild on the back streets of China and that old people used to smoke it freely for medicinal reasons while strolling down the main thoroughfares of their city? Foreigners' eyes used to bug out when they saw that. But young Chinese left it where it grew. I'm not up to date on the situation nowadays except to say that most Chinese youth tend to steer clear of all drugs and alcohol abuse because it would interfere with their studies and their opportunities to get ahead in life.
Asian cultures place great emphasis on education, but if there's less drug use there these days, it's because: a.) the opium wars kind of screwed the country up, and the b.) the communists have cracked down hard on drug smuggling.
But in all likelihood, Chinese youth still use drugs just like everyone else. They drink, they smoke, and they do ecstasy and other drugs. Weed is probably less popular these days though.