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  3. Is America losing the battle against teen drug abuse? Despite years of anti-

Is America losing the battle against teen drug abuse? Despite years of anti-

游客2024-03-04  42
问题     Is America losing the battle against teen drug abuse? Despite years of anti-drug campaigns, drug use among American teens is increasing dramatically. Consider the statistics. The PRIDE(Parents’Resource for Drug Education) survey of more than 140,000 students shows that drug use among 11-to-14-year-old children is on the rise, with 11.4 percent of junior middle school and high school students reporting monthly use of marijuana, cocaine, or other illegal drugs. In a study issued last year by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse(CASA) at Columbia University, researchers found that drugs are more readily available and used by youth at a younger age than ever before.
    The findings have sounded a national alarm and ongoing debate about how to counter the disturbing trend. Last year, President Clinton called the dramatic increase in drug use among America’s youth "the ultimate threat to the future of our country."
    Ironically, today’s teenagers are exposed to more drug education than any previous generation—the federal government has required public schools to teach drug prevention since 1987. The fact that drug use is still on the rise has caused policymakers, school officials, and parents to reexamine current drug prevention efforts.
    While many parents call for more governmental and school intervention to tackle the drug problem, the PRIDE survey revealed that parental involvement plays a key role in teenage use. According to the survey, only 31 percent of parents are warning their children often about the dangers of drugs, and these parental warnings can have a dramatic effect. Students who are given a clear set of rules reported 57 percent less drug use.
    "Just by talking to your kids you can decrease drug use probably by about a third," said Thomas Gleaton, Jr., president and cofounder of PRIDE.
    Some schools and parents are tackling the problem on two fronts: talking and testing. In a school in Texas, students have taken drug tests voluntarily. Those who passed were given cards entitling them to discounts at 150 local businesses. The discounts served as incentives to keep teens off drugs. And the possibility of random drug tests has helped some youth ward off peer pressure to experiment with drugs in the first place. Modest experiments are under way in other communities across the nation as well.
    Parents who worry about the possibility of their child’s drug abuse are also turning to testing in an effort to help.
    Drug testing is not a novel concept in today’s society. Routine drug testing is part of the entrance requirement for millions of job applicants nationwide. Most of the Fortune 200 companies require their, employees or job applicants to submit to some form of drug testing.
    Faced with the uncertainty whether their child is using drugs, parents are taking responsibility for, and control of, their teenagers by administering in-home drug tests. There are two types of over-the- counter drug tests—urine or hair analysis. The urine or hair analysis is currently the most widely used method of drug testing, but hair testing is gaining in popularity and support.
    A principal difference between the two tests is that urinalysis typically reveals drug use during the previous three to four days. Hair analysis, on the other hand, can detect usage for the previous 90 days. When drugs are ingested, they circulate in a person’s blood. The circulating blood nourishes the hair follicle so that trace amounts of the drugs become entrapped in the core of the hair shaft. While people have "beat" the urine test by abstaining for a few days before testing, drug residues in the hair cannot be washed, bleached, or dyed out.
    The patent for the hair-drug analysis process has been held by Psychemedics Corporation since 1987 Until last year, Psychemedics—which serves a client list that includes General Motors, Harvard Medical School, and the Chicago Police Department, to name a few—had no plans to expand into the consumer market.
    But when requests from concerned parents became overwhelming, the Boston-based Psychemedics began offering its in-home hair sample collection product under the name PDT-90—for personal use. For the test, an inch and one-half snippet of about 50 hairs is collected, put into a plastic bag, and then sent to the company’s lab for analysis. Using a technique called radioimmunoassay of hair(RIAH), the company can confirm if illegal drugs—marijuana, cocaine, opiates(heroin), methamphetamine, or PCP—have been used during the past three months. Parents access the confidential and anonymous test results only through code numbers: TM names are never used.
    For most parents and teenagers, hair analysis is less intrusive and embarrassing than urinalysis. "It’s probably the friendliest drug test a person will ever take," said one business executive who plans on using the test in his family. While some protest the test as an invasion of privacy, others argue that the non-intrusive test actually empowers a family by tackling the issue before it becomes a problem, or by allowing parents to intervene in a constructive way when their children are using drugs. Families have established drug-free policies in their homes, beginning drug tests would be part of their rites of passage. To reward drug-free status, these families have initiated incentives—college savings programs, car insurance premiums, or other positive reinforcements.
    By bringing the message of the dangers of drugs home, parents are taking an active part in redressing the problem of drug abuse head-on.
选项 A、Y
B、N
C、NG
答案 A
解析 在第一段的开头作者告诉我们美国青少年吸毒现象正在大幅度上升。结尾有一段话：In a study issued last year by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse(CASA) at Columbia University，researchers found that drugs are more readily available and used by youth at a younger age than ever before．把这两部分内容结合起来，不难看出所给的论述是正确的。
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