When it comes to drug addiction young teenage girls are more at risk than ever. Am I surprised. No I know this from watching my own young teen. The other day I caught her talking on the phone to a friend and telling her 'I could really use a lorezapam.' She is only fourteen.
So where did she get this idea she could really use a lorezapam (which is a drug ten times as strong as valium.) Well it just so happens that her cousin who is eighteen has bee prescribed it for some kind of anxiety disorder. And now she thinks it cool to be all upset and on a drug as well. It does not help either that half of my family is on anti-depressants are anti-anxiety drugs of one form on another either. So she gets the idea that it is her life path to eventually be on them from us as well.
Not only that a ivillage.com also recently reported a study that teen girls are also feeling more competitive with boys lately and think they can do everything the same way boys can – including the way boys drink and do drugs. Girls now take steroids and chug down kegs of beer too after a football game. They are also smoking drinking and getting into car accidental at accelerated rates. There is also a terrible rise in teen pregnancies, which means that these girls also have an unrealistic view of themselves as being strong enough personally and financially to be a single mother.
A study conducted in 2006 by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse showed that girls aged 12-17 were at a high risk than boys for substance abuse. Another 2006 study, this by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy also revealed that more teen girls rather than teen boys are addicted to drinking, drugs and shoeing. And finally, a recent University of California study revealed that teen girls are almost as bad as the boys when it comes to getting in car accidents.
The bottom line is that girls cannot handle the same amount of this type of addictive stress as boys. They are smaller physically and more hormonal. However I can't tell my teenager daughter anything like that or else I am being sexist and not a feminist. Not that she likes feminists much either. She would see having a baby out of wedlock as an expression of her independence or even love of some guy rather than as an act of feminism.
Still I know that her and her friends consider themselves to be better than boys in many ways. I have heard them talking about how women have greater stamina or how a girl can do anything that she wants. Still, having girls on par with the boys when it comes to adolescent alcohol or drug abuse or car accidents is not great of an achievement.