I have graduated in Science of Education and have been working in the field of cultural and project management for over 20 years. I have a variety of interests in fields of knowledge like philosophy, psychology, social theory and others. I have been working as freelance AI evaluator for various companies (Outlier, Alignerr, Pareto and others) for some time now and recently started small research projects on AI out of my own interest.
Apart from this I also write experimental novels and am interested in mindfulness and presence practices.
Daniel Fenge
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I am trying to think of, what a helpful comment in your situation woud be. I noted the way you phrased, what seems to be your key objective—”to persuade him to stop these thoughts”. First of all I think it would be better to try to convince him, because this will probably longer lasting effects, than mere persuasion. Also “stopping these thoughts” seems also a difficult, if not impossible task. After all, we don’t really control our thoughts as such—they come up from we don’t know where, even though it is possible to train our cultivate certain though patterns and cognitive or meta-cognitive structures and ideas.
Ultimately, what you are wishing for, is your son to be safe. At the same time you are getting scared by his ideas and plans about experiments with drugs.
It should be recognized though, that it is pretty uncommon for a teenager to rationalize and legitimize the use of drugs with rational (or half-/pseudo-rational -I don’t want to argue this at this point) arguments. Most teenagers who do drugs—as a quick AI enhanced research[1] suggested they do it for the following reasons:
Curiosity and experimentation
Peer pressure and social influence
Stress, anxiety, or depression (self-medication)
Low self-esteem or lack of coping skills
Family problems or parental neglect
Easy availability of drugs
Desire for pleasure or escape
Media and cultural glamorization
Genetic or biological vulnerability
Lack of supervision or meaningful activities
In my opinion you might want to consider, what is the motivation behind your son’s idea to take drugs. What does he want to achieve? Obviously he is looking for something.
Partially to me it looks as if he is looking for something deeper—especially when he is saying “Why not try heroin if the purpose of life is to optimize happiness assuming heroin provides proportionally more even if for a shorter amount of time?”
So what I am suggesting is trying to understand his deeper motivations and then trying to offer alternatives and different perspectives, that can help him to make the experiences he is looking for, without unnecessary risks.
At the same time this might be an opportunity and invitation for yourself to look deeper into yourself. What is your own relationship to risky, novelty-seeking or for that matter depth and meaning-seeking transformative experiences? I am just giving some ideas based on my own experiences—I hope this can help you in your situation.
Sources:
Steinberg, L. (2010). A Dual Systems Model of Adolescent Risk-Taking. Developmental Psychobiology, 52(3).
Khantzian, E. J. (1997). The Self-Medication Hypothesis of Substance Use Disorders. American Journal of Psychiatry, 154(2).
Brown, B. B., et al. (2008). Peer Influence in Adolescence. In Handbook of Adolescent Psychology.
Volkow, N. D., & Koob, G. F. (2015). Brain Disease Model of Addiction: Why is it so Controversial? The Lancet Psychiatry, 2(8).
UNODC (2022). World Drug Report: Adolescents and Drug Use.
NIDA (2023). Preventing Drug Use among Children and Adolescents.
Primack, B. A., et al. (2017). Exposure to Substance Use in Music Videos and Adolescent Behavior. JAMA Pediatrics.