All my (high IQ) family have used illicit drugs - mother, father, uncles, aunts (cannabis for the most part, though my husband - who no longer uses any - has tried most things). None had addiction issues, some still, in their 60s use cannabis occasionally for recreational purposes. All those that did not have other issues (such as mental illness not related to drug use) have stable and successful careers and lives. I think there is a lot of fear around drug use that is not really supported by lived experience.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not promoting drug use and I don't mean that drug use is risk free - while I drink recreationally, I'm the black sheep in the family for not having tried much else because I'm not comfortable with the potential implications. My mother, who is mentally ill, regularly used cannabis when I was growing up with not terribly positive results. I also went to school with a guy, who I suspect was PG, who has ended up being regularly admitted to psych wards over the course of his adult life due to psychotic episodes apparently caused by his very heavy adolescent drug use - but there were other factors at play there too, including extreme family breakdown and abuse. So while I understand how detrimental it can be for vulnerable people, there is, I suspect, often more to negative outcomes than just the drug use. My understanding is that the majority of people who experiment with drugs have positive experiences, with no discernible negative outcomes.
There is a book on this that was recently published by an Australian journalist, Louise Pryor. I haven't read it, but is has been very positively received here by medical professionals and community groups for presenting a realistic look at recreational drug use:
http://www.amazon.com/Small-Book-About-Drugs-ebook/dp/B005DXOPFKI certainly don't mean we should be forcing drugs down kids' throats, and there will be consequences for dd if I find she is using drugs before she's 18 (18 is when children come of age here), but I do thinking that panicking about them is unproductive and, largely, unnecessary. I think, much like many other risky things, kids need to be educated about the risks involved and how to handle themselves if they do get in to trouble (so many publicised young drug deaths here seem to have been as a result of kids not knowing what to do when things do go wrong, or not calling help because they don't want to get in to trouble).
