I would like to dedicate this lecture to the student who died last year, January 12th, 2019 because of alcohol overdose. When his fraternity brothers found him around 10:00 AM, he was already gone. The time of death, according to the officials, was reported at 3:30 AM. His blood level alcohol was 0.33. That is really high. No other drugs were detected in his blood except for alcohol. He was 18 years old and he was going to be a sophomore, but he's not. I don't want to keep the picture there. You get the picture. This is something serious that I'm going to talk about and I'm just hoping that you pay attention. We're going to have to group exercises and I really want everybody to participate. The reason that this is very close to my heart is that I have seen this over and over. This is really not the first time that I have experienced anything like this, so his death prompted the formation of a task force on this campus by our chancellor. It was called the task-force on alcohol, drugs, and mental health. I was one of the members of the task force, we came up with recommendations and one of the recommendations was to teach classes like Life 101, make them mandatory for freshman students and also really to create an education campaign on campus. I'm not going to tell you what happened to the students who were there and who were established in the apartment that was, I wouldn't say it belong to the fraternity, but these were students who were in that fraternity. They were charged. Their age group was from 20-21. The reason that they were charged is that they were involved in providing alcohol to a minor. He was only 18 years old, a freshman student at UCI. Hopefully with some of the educational campaign that you're going to have on this campus, we are going to do a better job educating you about the harmful effects of alcohol and other drugs. But before I start even giving the lecture today, I went back and forth about sharing this video or not sharing this video and I say, you know what? You're all adults. This is a study that was published two years ago looking at data from 1999-2016. This is a collaborative group, they are called Global Burden of Disease 2016 group. They looked at all the publications that you can find out there from 195 different countries on alcohol consumption. Because as you know, there are scientific data suggesting that alcohol can have health benefits, you've all heard that, that a little bit of red wine is good for your heart. Have you guys heard that? A little bit of this is good because it relaxes you. Guess what? No level of alcohol consumption improves health because they were trying to find out what would be a good dose for alcohol? What would be a level? Is this one glass of wine? Is this half a glass of wine? What is it? This is what they reported that the therapeutic level, the good level is this, zero. When I give public talks because as you know, my lab and what I teach in the community is about improving health span and is to add healthy years to human life. I tell my public audiences that if you like to drink and it makes you happy and it relaxes you, who am I to tell you not to do that? But if you're asking a scientist and a health care provider, what is the therapeutic level, the best dose of alcohol? This is what the data shows. The data shows that no level of alcohol consumption improves health. This was published in Lancet, which is a very reputable journal two years ago. Here is the data; 49 percent of full-time college students during alcohol and or abuse drugs, whether they are illegal or prescription. We're going to talk about both categories today. These are some of the bad drugs on college campuses. These are substances with high abuse potential among college students. I am not going to stand here and say that anybody who uses these drugs, the pictures that you see on this slide is an addict or is a drug abuser. But I can tell you that most drug addicts in the community, and I'm talking about adults who are working, they graduated from college, they have a job or they're in grad school. They tell you that everything started in college. We as a group, as a class today, we are going to figure out, what are some of the reasons that contribute to that? The statistics that I'll show you, this is about 50 percent of college students. These are some of the substances that we see in college students. Prescription drugs. Here I'm talking about pretty much any prescription drugs that has the potential for abuse. I'm talking about Adderall, I'm talking about Ritalin. I'm talking about opioids. I'm talking about the Oxycontin that was prescribed to us because we had a knee injury and then it felt good, so we kept going back to the doctor and asking for more. We are also here talking about some other prescription drugs with potential for abuse such as Xanax. We're going to hear about what Xanax can do. I'm also talking about smoking. This is cigarette and marijuana smoking. One in 22 college students use marijuana when they're in college. There are various reasons for that. I'm not going to get into it, but I'm going to show you a couple of slides so that you can see what are the harmful effects of marijuana, because collectively as a culture, especially with what is happening right now, we think marijuana is safe. I don't want you to raise your hands, but if I had asked you in the beginning of the class, "Guys, I'm going to talk about drugs of abuse. I'm going to talk about bad drugs on college campuses. Do you think marijuana is one of them?" I can guarantee you that you wouldn't say yes to that. You would say that, "This is pretty safe." We are going to find out why marijuana is not safe. You know what adds to the problem is not just marijuana by itself, it's the synthetic marijuana, it's the marijuana that you find in edibles, it's the marijuana that is synthetic. The rate of college students who consume synthetic marijuana is one in 10, it's even more than marijuana smokers and users. We will talk about some of the harmful effects of marijuana. But this is a problem that we have. Another drug, alcohol. We're going to also figure out why college students start drinking. Even if they were not drinkers in high school, they start drinking in college. We're going to talk about alcohol too. Finally, the newest kid on the block is e-cigarettes and vaping. If you guys had any notion that this is safe because I'm vaping water, are we really vaping water when we use these things? No. What are we vaping? First of all, if we were vaping water, why could they be so addictive? Are you guys addicted to water? I have to force myself to different water. I'm just like, "My God, today I didn't bring any water. Let me have some water." Why are they so addictive? Yes. Because they still contain nicotine. They still contain nicotine. Guess what? They contain other things that may not even be seen on the labels. Are there any regulations for them? Not really. So they could have heavy metals and we know that some of them contain lead. Guess what? When lead gets to your brain, you don't want that. You don't want to have high lead concentrations in your brain because a lot of bad things could happen. Eventually, you're going to have lung problems. This notion that they are safe, forget that. The rate of use of e-cigarettes and vaping had increased by 900 percent among high school students , just in four years. I think the data is from 2011-2015. Why? Why do you think we have such? Because I talked to one of my former students who did use e-cigarettes and he told me how great they tasted. He particularly liked the tangerine one. Apparently, there is a tangerine taste. They look cool. They're using technology. Some of them have really interesting looks, here you see a few versions of them. We are a nation, we are people who like technology. So if you tell me that, "This vapor, it has a USB, you can put in the computer and it's charged," that makes it even cooler. Somebody told me that there are 15,000 flavors when it comes to e-cigarettes and vaping. This is a huge business, and unfortunately you're going to see that they are still not considered on the top five lists. But I really couldn't give this presentation without also talking about vaping and e-cigarettes.
