Daily Dosage: Aren’t any teens pumped on life instead of LSD?

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This week, a report in Pediatrics concluded that teen ADHD drug abuse is on the rise. Since 1998, calls to poison control about teenagers binging on methylphenidates and amphetamines – drugs to treat attention deficit disorder – shot up by 76 percent.

Now, I’ve been following the “teens expressing their Extreme Selfdom via drug abuse” for several months now. And I’ve gotta ask, are there any teenagers out there who aren’t abusing a substance? Isn’t anyone getting high on puppy love anymore?

In a poll of 592 12- to 17-year-olds, 20 percent admitted they’d “borrowed” a prescription drug, usually Oxycontin or Darvocet, from a friend.

Around 25 percent of teens report using some kind of herbal supplement, like St. John’s Wort. Fine, except it makes them four times more likely to try LSD, PCP, ecstasy and mushrooms. And six times more likely to try cocaine.

Six percent of teenagers report using OxyContin ($80 a pop), a number that’s up 40 percent in the last three years.

They may not smoke cigarettes, but shisha’s recently been proven just as harmful – and it’s use among kids is climbing. At least in Michigan, where 30 percent of teens aged 14 to 18 reported regularly hitting the hookah.

Oh, and hide the cough syrup. One in ten teens use it – thanks to dissociative anesthetic powers of DXM – to get high.

These statistics are all relevant to within the past year. And I’m not sure what to interpret after looking at them together. Either a strong majority of teenagers are all hopped up on cough syrup, LSD and mom’s back relaxants, or a very small percentage of them are simply getting high absolutely all the time, on absolutely everything they can get their mitts on.