What Parents Don’t Know About Student Drug Use

(CNN) Rarely a week goes by when I don’t receive a frantic text or call from a desperate parent whose college-age kid is in an emergency room being treated for a drug-related problem.

Young adults ages 18 to 25 make up 11.1% of the more than 7.7 million drug-related annual emergency room visits in the United States, and they have the highest rate of cannabis-related ER visits, according to a 2023 report by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, or SAMHSA.

I’m a family physician and college health expert, and parents often lean on me to help them figure out what to do when their child is in crisis, which gives me a third title: medical myth buster.

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