In the latest sign that something is seriously amiss in the lives of adolescent girls, we now have figures on drug use in 2023 from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. And girls seem to be outdoing their male peers — not in a good way. When asked if they have used cannabis, alcohol or even fentanyl in the past year, many more girls said yes than boys.
More than 8% of girls aged 12-17 said they used illicit drugs in the past year, compared to 6.6% of boys. Those numbers represent a turn from what has historically been the trend. Traditionally, boys and men have been more willing to use illegal drugs for a variety of reasons, both physiological and environmental. On the most basic level, boys take more risks than girls. That’s why insurance companies charge more when teenage boys get driver’s licenses than when girls do. If there is one category where women’s drug use has sometimes exceeded men’s, it is with misusing prescription drugs. Because there is less criminal activity involved in acquiring these drugs, women tend to turn to them first — again being less inclined to take risks.
Now the picture is changing. First, it is true that drug use overall has declined over the past several years. Observers say that generally teens of both genders are taking fewer risks — they’re having less sex too, for instance. Reduced drug use is part of the trend. They’re sitting at home on their phones, not getting into as much trouble, Jean Twenge observed in her book “iGen.”
But drug use rose sharply in 2023. Cannabis is the most commonly used drug, not surprisingly. But opioids were the second most commonly misused drug for teens, with 574,000 using them in 2023, up from 406,000 the year before. This is a particularly worrisome trend because the younger that kids start using drugs, the more likely they are to become addicted as adults.
But what is going on in particular in the lives of girls? A report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last year suggests worrisome trends. It notes that “Among adolescents being assessed for substance use disorder treatment, the most commonly reported reasons for substance use included seeking to feel mellow or calm, experimentation, and other stress-related motivations.” That part is not new. But then it goes on to say that “approximately one half of respondents who reported past–30-day prescription drug misuse reported using alone.”
Experts are concerned about this, of course, because of the possibility of overdoses. Using alone means you’re less likely to be rescued when something goes wrong. But using alone also signifies that you might be using for a different reason. When I was younger, people used drugs with friends or at parties. There was peer pressure, but it was also a social lubricant (like alcohol) that allowed people to feel more comfortable in social settings.
Now it seems that drug use has become more of an isolated phenomenon. Reports about cannabis use, for instance, describe kids using in the morning before school to ward off anxiety. If drug use is being used more frequently as a coping mechanism for mental illness, it is not surprising that girls are using more. According to a 2021 CDC survey, which included data from more than 17,000 students, “57% of teen girls reported feeling persistently sad or hopeless in the past year — a nearly 60% increase from 36% in 2011. In contrast, 29% of teen boys reported feeling this way in 2021, an increase from 21% in 2011.”
The reasons teens use drugs is changing, which means the population of teens using drugs is changing. Using illegal drugs is obviously a problem no matter who is doing it and why. But the fact that they are doing it to cope with depression and anxiety is particularly, well, depressing. Teens should be enjoying their lives, and if in the past they used drugs because they wanted to see how much more enjoyment they could squeeze out of their social interactions, that’s a very different problem than teens using drugs to handle day-to-day living.
And girls using drugs face particular vulnerabilities that should also make us worry about this trend. In her bestselling memoir “Lit,” Mary Karr writes about one of the first times she was offered drugs as a teenager while she was on the road in California with some friends. On a beach in California, a young man named Ken offered her acid. “When I told him I didn’t have any money, he smirked, saying, They make chicks pay for doing drugs in Texas?” And you realize that Ken is looking for something very specific from this transaction.
Drugs may be a way for girls to cope with bad things that have happened to them (as was the case with Karr) or bad feelings they may have, but drugs are also used as a vehicle for further degrading and abusing girls. They render girls powerless.