Opioid Education for the Youth
Opioid Education for the Youth
Role of Opioid Education for the Youth
Discussion:Results
Opioid misuse is decreasing. For example, among high school seniors, the year past misuse of pain medication, heroine excluded, went down from a peak of 9.5 in the year 2004 to 3.4 percent in the year 2018. In the past year, the use misuse of Vicodin went down from peak of 10.5 percent in the year 2003 to a percentage of 1.7 in 2018, lastly the misuse of OxyContin has dropped from a peak rate of 5.5 percentage in the year 2005 to 2.3 percent in the year 2018. In addition, students in the 12th grade believe that it is harder to obtain opioid now than in the past. In 2010, 54% of 12th grade students believed that it was easy to access opioids as compared to 32.5% in 2018 (Hubbell & Reid, 2018). In this case this can be attributed to the awareness that has been created by educating youths about these substances and their effects towards someone. Commercials in the media also work very well in creating an awareness.
Adolescence is a critical stage of life for one to become addicted to a substance. This is due to a lot of factors that were mentioned by some students. This is a stage of self-realization and to some may be confusing and containing mixed emotions. This is due to a teenager trying to understand themselves and what they are meant to become in future, at the same time trying to keep up with the current trends as well as blending with his/her age mates. This can lead to a teenager to take the drugs to escape reality or to fit in with other teenagers who are using opioids for recreational purposes (McDONOUGH, 2016).
The brain’s reward center, matures rapidly during the years preceding adolescence. During this period, children begin to discriminate more carefully between less and more meaningful rewards, a capacity that underlies goal driven behaviors and internal motivation. As much as kids are easily rewarded, even using abstract tokens, as they get to their adolescence, they become more selective in terms of the goals they think are worth pursuing. This phenomenon gets to its peak when children get to their adolescence, at which time presentation of small and meaningless reward will result into deactivation of the brain’s reward center (Reid, Wild, & Bozarth, 2020). This means that, adolescents are developmentally conditioned to look for high stimulating behavior so as to acquire a large neurologic reward, this trait is recognizable in the risk taking behaviors that are often associated with people in this stage of life. Unlike the rewards that happen naturally, psychoactive substances trigger signaling in the reward center through the direct receptor binding (Bain & Kornetsky, 2020). Although this is unhealthy, substance use fills a developmental drive for stimulation in this particular area of the brain effectively. As one would predict, the peak ages of substance use initiation occurs during adolescence and early childhood.
At the end of the behavioral control hardware, the prefrontal cortex, that is responsible for executive functions which are crucial to decision making, this are functions such as self-monitoring, impulse control and error correction and thus this serves as a behavioral brake system, it does not mature to its full potential until the middle of the third decade of living. As a result of this, adolescents are unable and unskilled to conduct these functions and deterred by risk than the adults. In addition to this, immaturity of the prefrontal cortex during this developmental stage appear to leave the brain’s reward center more vulnerable and prone to developing the changes which might result into a neurologic disorder of addiction (Knopf, 2017).
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