When your teenager turns to drugs

Every parent's nightmare is that their child becomes addicted to drugs, but no child grows up believing that it will happen to them, or planning to be an addict. Children, by nature, are curious about the world around them and we encourage that curiosity, as we should. Parents try to arm their children against the bad in the world but in the end, teenagers will make decisions of their own, and sometimes these will be bad decisions.

There are many reasons that teenagers become addicted to drugs and many different types of addiction. Very rarely is it a parent's fault that it happens and it does not just happen in bad, poor or criminal families. Sometimes the addiction is almost accidental, as in addiction to pain medication, originally proscribed for a valid reason, and then becoming something the teenager cannot manage without. Occasionally the medical profession is too quick to offer the unhappy child, depression medication that then becomes a tranquilizer addiction. Whatever the reason, once a parent is aware, they will naturally do everything they can to help a child get over the addiction.

The problem is, very few parents are actually trained to do this, and their attempts to help may actually make the problem worse. The parent is too close to the child to be objective; drug withdrawal can be painful and messy and very few parents can handle seeing their child in pain. It can be humiliating for the child and create even further resentment towards the parent, that they directly witness this awful process and are inflicting this on their teenager.

The best choice is a professional drug rehab center that has the expertise to deal with drug addiction. The teenager is not just addicted to the drugs but also to the ritual surrounding getting the drugs and the people who are part of that scene. They need to be completely removed from this environment if they are to have a chance of breaking the cycle of addiction. The parent's tough job will be reintegrating them back after they leave the rehab center, a challenging enough task in itself.

The teenager has no emotional hold over the professionals at a drug rehab center and therefore no leverage. They will need to detoxify first and then relearn all their rituals to replace the drug habit with new positive habits. A drug rehab center has access to medication that can help the addict make the transitions less painfully. They have medical staff, trained to deal with withdrawal and a secure facility that will protect the teenager and watch them 24 hours a day if necessary. They also tend to have access to physical training equipment to help the teenager get healthy and nutrition experts to help replace the vitamins and minerals lost through the drug addiction. In comparison, a parent has a family home that an angry teenager will wreck, possibly other children and a partner that also need them and little medical expertise to deal with someone who is essentially ill.