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Comment by lenerdenator | Hacker News Reader

In 20 years we went from drinking and smoking weed being the worst things a teen could do, to those being the drugs you would hope your teenagers are doing if they're doing drugs while you're not around.

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I am not sure where you are, but opiates (morphine, heroine), benzos (valium, xanax), stimulants (Aderall, cocaine), hallucinogens (mushrooms, acid, mescaline) and more have been available for a very long time and teen substance abuse can be very experimental partially because of limited availability. It can be hard to get their drug of choice so they try something new.

Ha! So true.

Also ecstasy. Plus late 90s to the early naughts had a huge boom in designer drugs.

Are you serious. No other drugs than drinking and weed was consumed by youngsters in 2004? That's a ridiculous statement.

In my beige suburban Midwestern world, that was what kids did. shrug I'm sure that some did harder stuff but that was the majority of it.

You would properly have the same sentiment if you were young now. Turns out you can't rely on your own personal experience when gauging a population wide phenomenon. Especially when one is an outlier.

i'm sorry, i'm from michigan, and that is not all we did.

LOL

I mean, we call them the hard drugs which implies that there are soft drugs. The thing is that fentanyl is sort of in a class by itself. I don't know the specifics, but isn't a lethal dose on the order of a couple milligrams? An amount that you could not perceive if you picked it up.

I get the sentiment that it has gotten worse, but already 20 years ago(and earlier) the list of avaiable drugs to determined teenagers was a bit longer. If all fails, there are some hellish drugs right in the bushes. I didn't, but mates tried some. But they knew, the were doing something stupid (supposed to be cool, but they did not enjoy it).

The danger with fentanyl is, that it can be even put on weed in small drops, to make garbage weed seemingly strong. That is messed up and dangerous.

I mean the war on drugs is from 1971 [1]; the US signed a drug treaty in 1961 [2]. I think kids have been doing opioids for far longer than 20 years.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_drugs

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Convention_on_Narcotic_...

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