"Crack, booze, pot, crystal- from the inner city to the suburbs to small
             towns, the world of the adolescent is permeated by drugs. When 'a little
             harmless experimentation' becomes addiction, parents, teachers, and clinicians
             are often at a loss. For this age group (roughly ages 13 to 23), traditional
             substance abuse programs simply are not enough" (Nowinski, inside cover).
             Today's society provides many challenges for adolescents that our
             parents never had to face. Pre-marital sex and pregnancy, alcohol abuse, and
             drug addiction have always been around but they have never been more available
             to adolescents than they are now. Adolescents are more on their own to take
             care of themselves with more and more single parent households. The problem of
             drug and alcohol is a major one. Teenagers feel a need to drink and do drugs to
             fit in to peer groups. The problem is widespread. The common thoughts that
             drugs are only in the city where the poor live but that is wrong. Any single
             person can get drugs from the inner city to the small rural towns of Texas and
             Nebraska. It doesn't matter where you are. There is a major need for adults to
             intervene and stop the problem at its beginnings, the adolescents. If we sit
             here and deny the fact that the problem is there then we are just setting
             The first piece of literature that I used was a book written by Dr.
             Joseph Nowinski entitled Substance Abuse in Adolescents & Young Adults. It was
             written at the Elmcrest Psychiatric Institute in 1990. The book described Dr.
             Nowinski's study of adolescent addicts of drugs and alcohol. It goes on to
             explain the need for the development of treatment plans for adolescents because
             conventional plans do not work on this age group.
             The second source that I used was a journal article entitled "Prevalence
             of substance abuse in a rural teenage population." It
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