National Institute on Drug Abuse to answer questions such as: why do people start using drugs? Why do they continue? When do they reach a threshold to abuse? When do they stop? And when do they relapse? After this work was published, he was among a group of researchers drafted by the U.S. Heroin users wanted to numb themselves amphetamine users wanted to actively confront it. Milkman’s doctoral dissertation concluded that people would choose either heroin or amphetamines depending on how they liked to deal with stress. And there was a lot of interest in why people took certain drugs.” In the early 1970s, when he was doing an internship at the Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital in New York City, “LSD was already in, and a lot of people were smoking marijuana. “I was in the eye of the storm of the drug revolution,” Milkman explains over tea in his apartment in Reykjavik. If it was adopted in other countries, Milkman argues, the Icelandic model could benefit the general psychological and physical wellbeing of millions of kids, not to mention the coffers of healthcare agencies and broader society. “I’m just so impressed by how well it is working.” “This is the most remarkably intense and profound study of stress in the lives of teenagers that I have ever seen,” says Milkman. The way the country has achieved this turnaround has been both radical and evidence-based, but it has relied a lot on what might be termed enforced common sense. Those smoking cigarettes every day fell from 23 percent to just 3 percent. The percentage who have ever used cannabis is down from 17 percent to 7 percent. The percentage of 15- and 16-year-olds who had been drunk in the previous month plummeted from 42 percent in 1998 to 5 percent in 2016. Today, Iceland tops the European table for the cleanest-living teens. Or they might be on outings with their parents. Young people aren’t hanging out in the park right now, Gudberg explains, because they’re in after-school classes in these facilities, or in clubs for music, dance, or art. Here in the park, there’s also an athletics track, a geothermally heated swimming pool and-at last-some visible kids, excitedly playing football on an artificial pitch. “And here we have the indoor skating,” says Gudberg.Ī couple of minutes ago, we passed two halls dedicated to badminton and ping pong. “There were hordes of teenagers getting in-your-face drunk.” “You couldn’t walk the streets in downtown Reykjavik on a Friday night because it felt unsafe,” adds Milkman. Twenty years ago, says Gudberg, Icelandic teens were among the heaviest-drinking youths in Europe. Walking with me are Gudberg Jónsson, a local psychologist, and Harvey Milkman, an American psychology professor who teaches for part of the year at Reykjavik University. There’s an occasional adult with a stroller, but the park’s surrounded by apartment blocks and houses, and school’s out-so where are all the kids? More From Mosaic on a sunny Friday afternoon and Laugardalur Park, near central Reykjavik, looks practically deserted.