Parent Discussion}}}}
Did You Know?
- Smoking is the leading cause of premature, preventable death and disease in the United States.
- Each year, tobacco use results in more deaths than AIDS, unintentional injuries, suicide, homicide, and alcohol and drug abuse combined.
- Twenty percent of high school students report having smoked a cigarette in the last month.
- In 2008, approximately 1,000 young people (under the age of 18) became daily smokers every day.
- Involvement in structured activities, parental boundary setting, adult mentoring, perceived school connectedness, religious involvement, and other protective factors lower the chance that youth will engage in health-compromising behavior, including smoking.
Alcohol and Energy Drinks. It's Hot!
“We’re seeing kids coming in with blood alcohol levels in the mid-.3s, even .4, which is four to five times the legal limit for driving. That’s the level at which 50% of people die,” says Dr. Mary Claire O’Brien, an emergency medicine physician and assistant professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in North Carolina who specializes in alcohol-related research. “Ten years ago, we saw those levels only in chronic alcoholics...The practice of mixing alcohol with super-caffeinated energy drinks; the marketing of flavored malt beverages in 23.5-ounce cans, each containing a serious dose of alcohol; a shift in preference from beer to hard liquor; and the influence of social media, through which kids avidly share Jungle Juice recipes and tales of their exploits, have all raised the stakes.
“The caffeine blocks the part of alcohol that makes you sleepy and might otherwise cause you to pass out. This enables you to drink far more than you might have. By the time many of these kids get to the hospital, they have to be put temporarily on respirators because of depressed breathing.” Disturbed by what they were seeing, Dr. O’Brien and her colleagues conducted a survey that year of 4,271 students from more than 10 universities in North Carolina. “We found that about a quarter of the kids who’d had a drink in the past 30 days said they were mixing alcohol with energy drinks, either the premixed kind or Red Bull and vodka. They got drunk twice as often and drank more per session than those who had alcohol without caffeine. They were much more likely to be injured, much more likely to be taken advantage of sexually or to take advantage of someone sexually, much more likely to drive drunk. We banned alcoholic energy drinks when we became aware of the extraordinary threat they pose,” he says. “What shocked us was the hospitalization of 11 students after a single party.”
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