USA Today is really fucking stupid. They are talking about ‘binaural beats’ as digital drugs.
The only thing binaural beats can do is help stimulate certain kinds of brainwaves – and they do this by offsetting the left-right channels of your headphones by 3, 5, 8 or 13 Hz etc – which you can’t audibly hear, but your brain can detect the cycle of offset and synchronize your brainwaves to the same pattern.
Drugs do affect your brainwaves, but brainwaves alone will not cause complex druglike effects, especially if you know anything about neurochemistry and the many parts of the reward systems of your brain that drugs stimulate. The article is Am-Scare-Ica at it’s best. Oh no! Our children are listening to music that will put their brains into a state of zen-like meditation (and yes, I know Zen means meditation, but most people don’t.)