ALARMING. That is a word used to describe the barrage of statistics that lay bare the troubled times our teenagers face.

But it is one thing to sound the alarm, it is another thing to do something about it.

What are our children going through? Keep count:

One in five teens has attempted suicide.

One in four has considered suicide.

Alcohol use up.

Drug use up.

Obesity up.

About the only positive in the figures released is a reduction in the amount of teenage sexual activity – though the report shows that boys remain the ones likeliest to engage in risky sexual behaviour.

A shocking rise in cocaine use sees the percentage of teenagers partaking rising from one percent in 1998 to 12 percent in 2023.

That raises questions such as where are the drugs available to these teens – is it in their community, in their schoolyard?

And does that indicate a greater quantity of cocaine on our streets in general? Heaven forbid we slip back to the dark drug days of the 1980s.

The Tribune was on the front line back in those times, when NBC famously ran a report titled “The Bahamas: A Nation For Sale”.

For sale, it was. The nation was being used by such smugglers as Carlos Lehder, with Norman’s Cay serving as a base for smuggling cocaine into the United States.

There were allegations of bribes being taken to allow such a trade, with the 1984 Royal Commission into drug trafficking and government corruption leading to resignations and sackings, and questioning the origin of some of the amounts of cash received by Prime Minister Lynden Pindling, with explanations for where some of the deposits came from unable to be verified.

How does today compare? Well, now we have a US indictment alleging that members of our country’s uniformed services were part of a massive cocaine smuggling operation moving drugs into America. An unnamed top politician is mentioned in that indictment. Corruption continues to be a concern – although calls for a commission of inquiry have been deflected this time, with instead another path being proposed - a Commission of Investigations, only for it to seemingly have next to no direct budget allocated and little clarity about when it will tackle the big questions our country faces.

For our children, that is a paramount question – for that is the country they will inherit.

Clearly, we are failing them if these statistics are correct.

We are not keeping them from troubled paths. We are not making them happy. We are not even giving them a reason to live.

Sounding the alarm, and being alarmed is the very least we can do.

What needs to happen next is for a path to deal with these issues to be laid out.

Take a note – by this time next week, see which of our politicians and leaders are still talking about these figures.

This is not something we should declare as horrifying, throw up our hands in outrage and then move on from.

Many of our children do not even want to live. How do we fix that? How do we give them a reason to do so.

To those going through such pain, we need you. We want you to stay. We want you to play your part in our future. We want that future to be yours.

It is up to all of us to make that happen.