09-17-2023 GAR - Flipbook - Page 14
14 A Special Advertising Section of Baltimore Sun Media Group | Sunday, September 17, 2023
Not Just an Anecdote
Oleg Tarkovsky, director of behavioral
health at CareFirst Blue Cross Blue
Shield, shares an anecdote that is
scientifically backed:
Colliding Worlds
Talking to Teens About Substance Abuse
By E. Rose Scarff, Contributing Writer
T
wo worlds are colliding when
it comes to teens and substance
abuse. Some understanding of
both will help before any kind of conversation takes place. The first is the
developing brain of a teenager. The
second is the nature of addiction.
Adolescence is the time when teens
look for novel experiences, when parents begin to take a back seat to friends,
when they are beginning to look after
themselves more than before. This is
the prime time in their lives for experimentation, trying new roles, building
an identity for themselves.
Photo above: Adobe stock
“The actual biology and chemistry and neurology of the brain is in
a constant state of maturation,” says
Oleg Tarkovsky, director of behavioral health at CareFirst Blue Cross Blue
Shield, about the adolescent brain.
“The idea of addiction as a disorder is
what we call a developmental learning
disorder, which means it usually starts
and happens during those early development stages of adolescence.”
How addiction becomes a disease is
through learning and reinforcement,
the same process as all the other learning and reinforcement. “Learning how
to be a good person, learning a skill,
the mechanism in the brain that’s re-
sponsible for all that is the same mechanism that teaches us that heroin feels
good, and you want to do it again and
again,” says Tarkovsky.
Studies have shown that if the individual starts drug use before their
18th birthday there is a 20% chance
that they will become addicted. However, if the individual tries drugs, even
hard drugs like heroin after their 18th
birthday, that number drops to just
4%. “All of this has to do with this
developing adolescent brain and how
it’s so susceptible to this reinforcement
theory on a biochemical level,” says
Tarkovsky.
These biochemical aspects of addic-
“Four teenagers or adolescents go
to a party, and at this party there’s
drinking and drugging going on. The
welcoming person at the party sees
the four people come in, says, ‘Hey
guys, welcome to my party. I have
the super cool drug X, who wants to
try it?’ The first person out of the four
says, ‘Never, I don’t do drugs.’ And
they walk away. The second person
says, ‘I don’t really do drugs, but I’m
curious, so I’ll try it a little bit.’ The
third person says, ‘OK, let me try it.’
They try it and they say, ‘Oh man,
this is good. Keep me away from
this.’ The fourth person tries it and
says, ‘Hmm, this is great. Where can
I get more?’”
It’s the fourth person who will
have a problem with whatever this
substance might be.
tion are also influenced by social, emotional and psychological factors. There
is even an accepted ideology within
today’s addiction expert community
that there could be a genetic predisposition. But if you ask someone in their
40s or 50s if they have ever tried alcohol, tobacco or marijuana most would
answer yes, but very few of them are
addicted to these substances.
Colliding worlds
continued on page 16