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Dr. Esman calls the attention of the psychoanalytic community to the relatively new and rapidly increasing problem of drug abuse among our adolescent population.
It is difficult to obtain reliable statistics on the magnitude of teen-age drug abuse. Dr. Esman referred to an estimate of at least one-third of the students in a large metropolitan university having had “some experience with these agents.” But he does not say which drugs or whether the drug use was regular or a one-shot experimentation.
At a high school near UCLA, three separate groups of seniors recently estimated to our team of lecturers that between 70 and 85% of them had tried marijuana at least once and that 50% were regular social (weekend) users. All groups estimated one-time or more experimentation with LSD at from 10-20% of the group. Parenthetically, the principal of this particular high school feels that there is no special drug problem at the high school and to date has not allowed anyone in to discuss the problem with the students.
Dr. Esman is particularly fortunate, in the cases which he reports, to have seen the youngsters before they began to experiment with drugs. Thus, not only was he better able to understand the meaning of the drug taking in
their total life style, but he also had a relationship to use, in at least one of the cases, to work through the need for a drugged solution to life's problems.
But most of us who see adolescents who are chronic drug abusers (be it LSD, marijuana, or multiple drugs) see them only after they are well on the way towards their addictive (habituating) patterns. At this point the drugs provide so much gratification that they are unwilling to desist. This occurs despite dependency-independency conflicts plus hospitalization to get them off the drugs and into a relationship with the therapist.
I would now like to make some general comments about the drug abuser and his treatment. It is usually an irate parent who calls us after discovering the youngster sm