Tag Archives: Drugs

News

New study finds that fathers and marriage reduce drug use in children

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From the Heritage Foundation.

Excerpt:

Teen substance abuse is once again on the rise, according to a national study of adolescent drug and alcohol use released this week. The annual release of the Partnership Attitude Tracking Study (PATS) showed an alarming increase in adolescent substance abuse since 2008.

According to the study (PDF), teen illicit drug use and prescription drug abuse have significantly increased in the past three years. Marijuana use among adolescents increased 22 percent from 2008 to 2010, with nearly 40 percent of teens using the drug within the past year. Ecstasy use is also on the rise, increasing from 6 percent in 2008 to 10 percent in 2010. Likewise, 25 percent of teens admit they’ve taken medication not prescribed by their doctor, and one in five has used a behind-the-counter pain reliever without the direction of a doctor. This new data is especially worrisome, as it suggests that teen drug use is climbing again after a relative decline over the past decade.

Unfortunately, adolescent substance abuse is not reserved to the halls of high schools or prom after-parties. The nationally projectable study found an increase in alcohol use among young teens and even pre-adolescents. Almost two in three teens who admit to drinking alcohol said they had consumed their first full drink at age 15. Shockingly, 25 percent of the same group said they had first imbibed at 12 years old or younger.

[…]Whether teens have regular contact with their parents, especially with their fathers, can have significant impact on illicit drug and alcohol use. For instance, a child growing up in a divorced family is four times more likely to try illicit drugs by the time he or she is 14 than the same child raised in an intact, married family. Children who live with both parents and have close relationships with their fathers are less likely to smoke, drink alcohol, or use marijuana regardless of many other socioeconomic factors.

Religious practice also seems to have a positive effect on teens’ engagement in risky behavior. Adolescents who express personal religious beliefs and whose families regularly practice their faith are at lower risk for substance abuse. Fewer than one in 10 teens from an intact, religious family report ever using hard drugs, while more than one in five adolescents from non-intact, non-religious homes have abused illicit substances.

(I removed the links from the excerpt, but every assertion they make is linked to research)

I found this very interesting, especially since I was recently responding to a post that William Lane Craig posted on Facebook. Bill wanted to know why so many people seem to be incapable of considering both sides of a debate and judging who won the debate based on the arguments and evidence presented. This is relevant because in his two most recent debates, the atheists either presented no arguments or they did not attempt to refute his arguments or rebuttals. Bill’s question made me think of all the other factors that cause people to be unable to consider the case for Christianity on the merits, in a debate situation.

I replied to Bill that there were social forces that were breaking down children’s ability to consider both sides of questions so they could make their own decisions, instead of doing what their teachers and peers tell them to do, and this was especially bad as families break down and fathers are ejected from the home by women who chose to have sex with or marry men who are not qualified to be fathers, because they are not capable of being moral/spiritual leaders.

I wrote:

To answer Bill’s original question in the post, I think you have to point out what the public school system is doing to students. The public schools are not encouraging students to learn both sides of current issues so that they can debate them. They have a definite point of view that they are pushing, from the authority of the red pen.

For example, do you think that most public school teachers give equal time to proponents of vouchers or other school choice alternatives? Heck no. They have to be in favor of bigger government and higher taxes – that’s how they get paid. And you can see the same thing in debates about sexual ethics, moral relativism, moral equivalence, evolution, global warming, anti-capitalism, and so on.

They have an agenda. And when you have an agenda, you don’t present issues as having two sides that have to be judged on the merits. Instead, the public schools typically present one side with emotional stories or slogans, and the other side is derided with insults or made out to be a bogey-man. That’s the reason why the atheistic students cannot assess who won the debate. They have been trained in the schools to think one side is correct without ever have to assess the other side.

My favorite economist (Thomas Sowell) puts it well in this column:
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/226865/de-programming-students/thomas-sowell

I think it’s high time for Christian apologists to realize that it takes more than the kalam argument to defeat an atheist. You have to think of the dimension of family, and the schools, and even the laws and policies that incentivize certain behaviors that, one adopted into a lifestyle, make Christianity unpalatable because of its ethical demands.

Consider the impact on having a FATHER in the home on religious belief:
http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=14-01-026-f

And further consider that fatherlessness is correlated with atheism:
http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2008/vanhove_vitzreview_jan08.asp

Now – the question to ask is – what policies promote having a father in the home. Well, no-fault divorce and welfare programs certainly do not promote having a father in the home, for example. So the reason why so many people cannot judge a debate may not be as simple as saying “Bill Craig is a bad debater”. Bill Craig is an excellent debater. But if there are other circumstances at work due to bad policies that make children incapable of even considering the other side, then what can Bill Craig do? Well, Bill Craig could write about policy, I suppose, although we have other scholars for that. But we should all be thinking about it.

I’ve written before about how liberal women choose big government policies that will provide them with financial security regardless of who they choose to have sex with or marry. Liberal women like big government because it relieves of the responsibility to be prudent when choosing men. Tomorrow I am actually going to be explaining, with research, how liberal women actually resent the idea that they would have to conform to choice of sex partner/husband to any traditional male roles or to any courting rules. So long as liberal women continue to vote for big government and choose men based on superficialities like physical appearance, clothes, air of confidence and tone of voice, we are screwed as a society.

Men conform themselves to women’s expectations. If the ability to be a protector, provider and moral/spiritual leader are not the criteria that women use to choose men, then men will change into what women want. Women are the deciders. Men adapt to women’s expectations. That is why it is so important for women to put down the women’s magazines and pick up the research showing the importance of fathers, and specifically, the importance of fathers who have rationally-grounded, well-evidenced KNOWLEDGE about moral and spiritual matters. So long as women view men who have knowledge as “too strict” and “no fun”, children will be damaged.

Speaking of Facebook, if you want to be my friend on Facebook, my Facebook page is here and you can follow the blog here.

Mentoring

Read Theodore Dalrymple’s “Life at the Bottom” online for free

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I want to recommend that you read a book that is available online for free.

The author  is a psychologist in a British hospital that deals with a lot of criminals and victims of crime. So he gets to see the worldview of the “underclass” up close, and to understand how the policies of the compassionate secular left are really working at the street level. The theme of the book is that the left advances policies in order to feel good about themselves, even though the policies actually hurt the poor and vulnerable far more than they help them. And the solution of the elites is more of the same.

The whole book is available ONLINE for free! From City Journal!

Table of Contents

The Knife Went In 5
Goodbye, Cruel World 15
Reader, She Married Him–Alas 26
Tough Love 36
It Hurts, Therefore I Am 48
Festivity, and Menace 58
We Don’t Want No Education 68
Uncouth Chic 78
The Heart of a Heartless World 89
There’s No Damned Merit in It 102
Choosing to Fail 114
Free to Choose 124
What Is Poverty? 134
Do Sties Make Pigs? 144
Lost in the Ghetto 155
And Dying Thus Around Us Every Day 167
The Rush from Judgment 181
What Causes Crime? 195
How Criminologists Foster Crime 208
Policemen in Wonderland 221
Zero Intolerance 233
Seeing Is Not Believing 244

Lots more essays are here, all from City Journal.

My favorite passage

The only bad thing about reading it online is that you miss one of the best quotes from the introduction. But I’ll type it out for you.

The disastrous pattern of human relationships that exists in the underclass is also becoming common higher up the social scale. With increasing frequency I am consulted by nurses, who for the most part come from and were themselves traditionally members of (at least after Florence Nightingale) the respectable lower middle class, who have illegitimate children by men who first abuse and then abandon them. This abuse and later abandonment is usually all too predictable from the man’s previous history and character; but the nurses who have been treated in this way say they refrained from making a judgment about him because it is wrong to make judgments. But if they do not make a judgment about the man with whom they are going to live and by whom they are going to have a child, about what are they ever going to make a judgment?

“It just didn’t work out,” they say, the “it” in question being the relationship that they conceive of having an existence independent of the two people who form it, and that exerts an influence on their on their lives rather like an astral projection. Life is fate.

This is something I run into myself. I think that young people today prefer moral relativists as mates, because they are afraid of being judged and rejected by people who are too serious about religion and morality. The problem is that if you choose someone who doesn’t take religion and morality seriously, then you can’t rely on them to behave morally and exercise spiritual leadership when raising children. And being sexually involved with someone who doesn’t take morality seriously causes a lot of damage.

An excerpt

Here’s one of my favorite passages from “Tough Love”, in which he describes how easily he can detect whether a particular man has violent tendencies on sight, whereas female victims of domestic violence – and even the hospital nurses – will not recognize the same signs.

All the more surprising is it to me, therefore, that the nurses perceive things differently. They do not see a man’s violence in his face, his gestures, his deportment, and his bodily adornments, even though they have the same experience of the patients as I. They hear the same stories, they see the same signs, but they do not make the same judgments. What’s more, they seem never to learn; for experience—like chance, in the famous dictum of Louis Pasteur—favors only the mind prepared. And when I guess at a glance that a man is an inveterate wife beater (I use the term “wife” loosely), they are appalled at the harshness of my judgment, even when it proves right once more.

This is not a matter of merely theoretical interest to the nurses, for many of them in their private lives have themselves been the compliant victims of violent men. For example, the lover of one of the senior nurses, an attractive and lively young woman, recently held her at gunpoint and threatened her with death, after having repeatedly blacked her eye during the previous months. I met him once when he came looking for her in the hospital: he was just the kind of ferocious young egotist to whom I would give a wide berth in the broadest daylight.

Why are the nurses so reluctant to come to the most inescapable of conclusions? Their training tells them, quite rightly, that it is their duty to care for everyone without regard for personal merit or deserts; but for them, there is no difference between suspending judgment for certain restricted purposes and making no judgment at all in any circumstances whatsoever. It is as if they were more afraid of passing an adverse verdict on someone than of getting a punch in the face—a likely enough consequence, incidentally, of their failure of discernment. Since it is scarcely possible to recognize a wife beater without inwardly condemning him, it is safer not to recognize him as one in the first place.

This failure of recognition is almost universal among my violently abused women patients, but its function for them is somewhat different from what it is for the nurses. The nurses need to retain a certain positive regard for their patients in order to do their job. But for the abused women, the failure to perceive in advance the violence of their chosen men serves to absolve them of all responsibility for whatever happens thereafter, allowing them to think of themselves as victims alone rather than the victims and accomplices they are. Moreover, it licenses them to obey their impulses and whims, allowing them to suppose that sexual attractiveness is the measure of all things and that prudence in the selection of a male companion is neither possible nor desirable.

Often, their imprudence would be laughable, were it not tragic: many times in my ward I’ve watched liaisons form between an abused female patient and an abusing male patient within half an hour of their striking up an acquaintance. By now, I can often predict the formation of such a liaison—and predict that it will as certainly end in violence as that the sun will rise tomorrow.

At first, of course, my female patients deny that the violence of their men was foreseeable. But when I ask them whether they think I would have recognized it in advance, the great majority—nine out of ten—reply, yes, of course. And when asked how they think I would have done so, they enumerate precisely the factors that would have led me to that conclusion. So their blindness is willful.

Go read the rest!

Book reviews

News

New survey finds women more sexually active than men in high school

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Story here in the Sydney Morning Herald. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Year 12 girls are more likely to have had sex than boys, and teenagers are likely to have had sex with more partners than a decade ago, a national survey has shown.

More than 61 per cent of year 12 girls said they had had sex, compared to 44 per cent of boys of that year, the study by LaTrobe University’s faculty of health sciences researchers found.

In a trend the report links to heavier drinking by adolescents, the proportion of sexually active year 12 girls who reported having had sex with three or more partners in the previous year more than doubled to 27 per cent in the decade to 2008. Among boys, 38 per cent said they had had three or more sexual partners in the year.

The survey of 8800 year 10 and year 12 students in 300 schools around Australia was taken in three snapshots between 1997 and 2008.

The proportion of year 10 boys who had had sex rose slightly from 23 per cent to 27 per cent between 1997 and 2008, while for year 10 girls the rise was more significant, up from 16 per cent to 27 per cent.

In year 12, the number of boys who reported having had sex dipped slightly from 47 per cent in 1997 to 44 per cent in 2008, while the rate for girls rose from 48 per cent to 61 per cent.

The report, published in the latest Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, said the increased numbers of students having multiple sexual partners was significantly higher than that found in a large survey in the US and may be linked to heavier drinking among Australian teenagers.

”In Australia, rates of alcohol consumption among secondary students have increased markedly, as has the proportion of young people engaging in sex while under the influence of alcohol or drugs – these factors may be associated with the increases observed in sexual activity here,” the report says.

“Year 12” is what Australians call their final year of high school. Well, given what we now know about virginity and marital stability, this is the end of marriage in Australia, and that means that children will not be growing up in stable environments. Remember, feminism is the cause of female promiscuity – it was feminists who wanted to destroy marriage by forcing women to “have sex like men” in order to obliterate gender differences, and the “unequal gender roles” inherent in the institution of marriage. Feminists spearheaded sex-education, contraception and abortion. Feminist academics, feminist lawmakers and feminist policies pushed women into pre-marital sex. And this undermines chivalry, chastity and marriage.

I recently read a news story about a Duke University woman who engaged in hook-up sex with a variety of athletes. (I cannot write about it or link to it, it is so graphic). And the thing that stood out about the story for me was the woman’s criteria for men. It was all about physical appearance, entertainment and amusement, and sexual performance. (She also gave points for performance at sports activities and popularity on campus). These are the new criteria that women are using for men. They do not want to be led, they want to be entertained. They do not want marriage, they want fun.

This is the point where we have gotten to, where some women in the finest universities regularly take drugs and alcohol and have anonymous sex with men who mean nothing to them and who have nothing to do with them afterward. There is nothing that a man is supposed to do with a woman that is related to marriage or family. The man’s normal tasks of protection, providing and moral/spiritual leadership are now the role of the state, the courts and the public school system. A man’s role is sperm donor and tax payer.

The part that scares me the most is how a woman can choose to have sex with men like this, and maybe eventually co-habitate with one of them just by the force of inertia, and somehow get to the point where men are to blame for this. Aren’t women responsible for their own poor choices with men and sex? It’s very disconcerting to men who are marriage-minded to see the MAJORITY of women freely choosing to make themselves unsuitable for marriage. How can the destruction of marriage ever stop if women keep blaming everyone except themselves for their own bad decisions about men and sex? What will happen to the children who have to grow up in the world that feminism has made?

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