I don’t use drugs nor alcohol, but I just turned 18 and I noticed that a lot of people younger than me (high school age so 14-17 even) use alcohol and sometimes drugs from siblings, older friends, etc.
Did you do that when you were younger than me? I don’t plan on doing so anyway.
Fun fact from a psych nurse: you can usually estimate how many years a person has spent abusing substances by how many years behind they seem in their emotional development. A 30y/o who still acts 20ish has probably spent ~10 years using. It’s not necessarily contiguous, they might have started at fifteen, used for 3, got sober for two, used for 7 more then been sober for the last 3, but they’ve probably spent about ten years using in total. Abusing substances lets people avoid the psychological crises they would normally need to confront to grow as a person. When they stop using they don’t get to skip ahead, they have to pick up maturing from where they left off. It can also happen with non-substance behavioral addictions (like gambling) but it has to be real bad.