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A day in the life of a U.S. teen: not pretty

Posted on Oct 19th 2007 5:21PM by Brian White
Are U.S teenagers a happy go lucky bunch these days? According to a new federal report, not so much. An average day in the life of a U.S. teen involves smoking, drinking and some illegal drug use by many.

No, that's not really an "average" day for many, but it is for some. Here's the explanation from the report: on an average day, nearly 1.2 million teenagers smoked cigarettes, 631,000 drank and 586,000 used marijuana. Those are pretty large numbers, right?

Even further, nearly 50,000 used inhalants, 27,000 used hallucinogens, 13,000 used cocaine and 3,800 used heroin. Those numbers may sound small out of the millions of teenagers in the U.S., but they are not at all. As the report concluded, "In the United States in 2006, one-third of adolescents aged 12 to 17 drank alcohol in the past year, one-fifth used an illicit drug and one-sixth smoked."

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