An American helped Iceland fix its teen substance abuse problem (wbur.org)

Not to get all correlation/causation [0] on this, but teen substance abuse is down globally across the board.

In the US, for example, alcohol use by 8th graders dropped from 45%+ in 1992 to below 25% in 2012 [1], the period described in this article.

Fairly sure middle schoolers in the US aren't getting natural highs...unless social media counts!

[0]: https://xkcd.com/552/

[1]: https://monitoringthefuture.org/data/bx-by/drug-prevalence/#...

> Twenty years ago teens in Iceland were among the heaviest substance abusers in Europe — with more than 40 percent of 15- and 16-year-olds reporting being drunk in a given month.

> Fast forward to 2017, and the country boasts the fewest drinking, smoking and drug-taking youth on the continent.

This is one metric that they are then combining with two other metrics to show...depreciation in the first? Like...yeah, that's how numbers work.

Went in fairly sceptical, as the opening gambit concerns underage drinking, which as a Brit, I view as a minor peccadillo.

But there's something good in there - actually quite a fascinating approach to substance abuse, that a person's approach to stress dictates the appeal of certain drugs.

Not mentioned but the appeal of e.g. LSD also falls out of this. I'm not sure it needs to be quite this pathologised though.

Unfortunately the article doesn't pay off in the end, and amounts to "open youth centres for kids to stop them drinking", which is remarkably unoriginal.

Just to snark, it really is transformative, parents who spend time with their kids!

Contrast this program with more draconian drug policies like "give drug dealers the death penalty". Very impressive.