This Will Get You High

What are they Puffin in Iceland? According to the latest numbers, not much. And that’s exactly what researchers and public officials hoped they’d achieve when they embarked a “radical and evidence-based” quest to identify why teens get hooked on drugs (with the hopes of ultimately removing or replacing some of those triggers). Consider these remarkable stats: “Today, Iceland tops the European table for the cleanest-living teens. The percentage of 15- and 16-year-olds who had been drunk in the previous month plummeted from 42 per cent in 1998 to 5 per cent in 2016. The percentage who have ever used cannabis is down from 17 per cent to 7 per cent. Those smoking cigarettes every day fell from 23 per cent to just 3 per cent.” The strategy has several components, but one of the key elements is the move to replace artificial highs with natural ones. From Mosaic: Iceland knows how to stop teen substance abuse but the rest of the world isn’t listening.

+ “If you can smell the alcohol and get to the fruit faster, you have an advantage. You defeat the competition and get more calories.” We’ve been hooked on alcohol for a long time. A really long time. It may have been the thing that got us to come down from the trees. From NatGeo: Our 9,000-Year Love Affair With Booze. (I once had a hangover that lasted almost that long.)