Talking about causes of drug use is at least risky. A diversity of known factors are compounded by the fact that none of them seems to be necessary or sufficient condition to account for home consumption. In each case there is an original combination of factors that explain their particular route. It therefore seems more appropriate to speak of the conditions that favor this process, the risk factors that make it more likely. The most relevant of these factors are:
- - Curiosity: By experience, which is a natural and desirable characteristic of adolescence. So we have to educate, to become a source of maturation and stop focusing on risk.
- - Peer group pressure: trend towards homogeneity within the group, as it facilitates the adoption of certain signs of identity, dress, music, etc .- has a leading role in initiating drug use.
- - Search for pleasure: the consumption of drugs has always been linked to a desire to disconnect from the overwhelming demands of reality, in an attempt to make the most of leisure time. When during childhood and adolescence and we learn other forms of entertainment, drugs can play a vital safeguard.
- - Control inconsistent family: when family rules are too rigid, relaxed or unchanged, it is difficult to internalization by children and adolescents clear behavior patterns, so that their socialization outside the family will be greatly affected.
- - Availability of drugs: if the environment in which the teenagers live their leisure time there is a notable presence of drugs, home consumption is favored.
They are obviously the only risk factors but are among the most relevant and above all be factors that can act in advance.
Have identified a large number of factors that decrease the probability of entering in drug use. Some of them are related to cultural and legislative changes in our society (to eliminate alcohol advertising and snuff, raise money, rigorously enforce laws prohibiting sale to minors, widespread in prevention, prohibition of smoking in places public etc.)..
Other features are related by subject, each of the people throughout his life have to take the decision to use drugs or not and whether you routinely tested once.
In relation to these factors are known successful approaches and various proposals designed some of the following objectives:
- - Channel positively adolescent curiosity so that, keeping alive their exploratory drive is uninterested best to risk behaviors and situations. It is what is intended, for example in information campaigns through various media (brochures, Internet, etc..) Seek to provide young people with useful information on the risks associated with drug use. Initiatives to make rational arguments the impulse of curiosity, thereby supporting a more open decision-making before the expected offer of drugs that will be sooner or later.
- - Promote education in values and attitudes: appreciation, respect and responsibility for own health and the community. It is the object, eg the various existing prevention programs in schools that seek to awaken in students an awareness that health does not depend on chance but that is largely conditioned by the decisions that each person takes. Thousands of educators at all stages who spend much of their time to this task.
- - Encouraging self-esteem in order to reduce the risk of having an interest in chemical formulas to shore up a fragile self-esteem. Besides the aforementioned preventive programs, there are thousands of schools in Spain of Parents in that debate the most appropriate educational relationship with their children, are addressed in multiple ways to develop each child and adolescent positive self image that will make them less vulnerable to external influences.
- - Develop social skills: to help them act with reasonable autonomy in relation to others, to neutralize the positive pressure from the group of friends to the drug and, if necessary, to change the very landscape group. Again the school and family share many initiatives to train children and adolescents in these guidelines assertive relationship that will help them to respect others and themselves claim to equal consideration.
- - Promoting a rich and diverse experience of leisure: to help the teenager to find satisfactions that do not compromise their development, and build positive ways to enjoy leisure, from the possibilities of the territory it inhabits. They are in this sense, many of experiences in the Spanish towns and cities, aimed at educating teenagers in a rich entertainment and experiences to promote leisure activities for alternatives to "running out".
- - Encourage a reasonable exercise of parental authority, that allows children and adolescents internalize acceptable standards of living and increasingly responsible decisions, even when they act motivated by curiosity and pleasure. Schools of Parents occupy a unique position here at a time when young people themselves to their parents claim the existence of clear boundaries.
- - Reducing the presence of drugs: in social settings by moving adolescents. For easier access to drugs increased consumption, greater and greater difficulties arising abuse. Hence the importance that drugs are not a permanent reality and ubiquitous in the territories adolescents and youth.