On the causes of juvenile drug-addiction

Possible prerequisites of drug use can be both social reasons - problem family, lack of actual juvenile leisure and employment programme, and individual psychological factors - imitating the elder or authoritative peers, attempt to neutralize negative emotions, abnormal personal traits, curiosity, submission to pressure and threats. Objective causes of juvenile drug-addiction include deformation in family upbringing (parents’ alcoholism or drug-addiction, cult of total permissiveness imposed in some families, parents’ undervaluation of the child drug abuse), provocative role of mass media, informal group influence, pedagogical situation defects, lack of life prospects, fashion of drugs, adult drug-users’ negative influence on juveniles. Subjective causes of juvenile drug-addiction involve emotional immaturity, weak resistance to psychic overloads, increased anxiety, lack of self-confidence, low self-estimate, awareness of their own deficiency, impulsiveness of behaviour, defects in self-control, value estimate deficiency, moral ignorance, increased suggestibility, proneness to self-assertion.