Teen Health Today

Teen Health Today

Vaping, Drinking, Weed, And Youth - What's Next?

What you need to know about youth drug use, PLUS essential stories about ICE protests, looksmaxxing, and the auntie movement

Christopher Pepper's avatar
Christopher Pepper
Feb 15, 2026
∙ Paid

Hi Readers!

  • I’m Christopher Pepper, an award-winning health educator and the co-author of Talk To Your Boys.

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In this edition:

  • This Small School District Kept Losing Students To ICE. So It Mobilized.

  • The Future Of Substance Abuse In Youth

  • I Cut Technology Out Of My Classroom For A Month. Here’s How It Went.

  • We Have A Loneliness Epidemic. We Have An Overwhelmed Parent Epidemic. Could The Two Problems Help Solve Each Other?

  • When We Talk About Body Image, We Usually Picture Girls. Maybe We Shouldn’t.

  • Handsome At Any Cost

  • Students Across the U.S. Are Protesting ICE. Texas Wants to Punish Their Schools.


white table with black chairs
Photo by MChe Lee on Unsplash

This Small School District Kept Losing Students To ICE. So It Mobilized (The Washington Post)

By Karin Brulliard: First period was about to begin Tuesday when the phone rang at Columbia Academy. The parent of one of the middle school’s students had been detained by immigration authorities, and the family needed help finding a lawyer.

It was one more in a steady stream of daily crises that had confronted Leslee Sherk, Columbia Academy’s principal, in this immigrant-heavy Minneapolis suburb every day for more than two months. They arrived in dings on her phone, in scratchy dispatches on her walkie-talkie, in frantic calls to the office, in whispers from children in hallways, in emails on her sticker-covered laptop, tallying the latest number of students with at least one parent detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement: 16, up from 10 the week before. READ MORE

From Christopher - WHY DID I CHOOSE THIS STORY? A lot of my readers are teachers and/or parents of school-age kids, and it’s important we think strategically about how to respond to government agencies threatening families and children.


The Future Of Substance Abuse In Youth (The Future of Everything Podcast)

Developmental psychologist Bonnie Halpern-Felsher specializes in teenage health-related decision-making, especially in their use of tobacco, alcohol, cannabis, and other substances.

Young people, she says, value immediate social benefits over long-term risks. In response, she supports bans on flavored nicotine products and has developed nationally and internationally used evidence-based substance use prevention and intervention programs, including some that are culturally targeted, such as her vaping prevention curriculum in Hawaii zeroing in on popular flavors like mango and poi. The reward, she says, is reduced substance use and better mental health. “Talk to your kids. Don’t lecture. Have a conversation,” Halpern-Felsher tells host Russ Altman of the best way to break through on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast. WATCH

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