JUVENILE HOMICIDES DECLINE; DRUG USE HOLDS STEADY

WASHINGTON, Dec. 14 (AP) — A six-year decline in the rate of homicide
arrests of juveniles has brought the 1999 rate down 68 percent from its
1993 peak to the lowest level since 1966, the Justice Department reported
today.

A separate government study issued today reported that illicit drug use
among teenagers held steady in 2000 for the fourth straight year, while
cigarette smoking declined significantly. But heroin use among high school
seniors was found to be at a record high.

The juvenile-crime report, by the Justice Department's Office of Juvenile
Justice and Delinquency Prevention, was based on arrest statistics compiled
by the F.B.I., and defined juveniles as youths 10 to 17 years old. It found
that juveniles' arrest rate for four major violent crimes — murder, rape,
robbery and aggravated assault — plunged 36 percent from its 1994 peak to
1999, reaching the lowest point since 1988.

Experts say the decline of crack cocaine and the violent gangs that peddled
it, combined with expanded after-school crime prevention programs and
big-city police crackdowns on illegal guns, have turned around the
juvenile-crime wave that pushed homicide arrest rates for youths up from
1987 to a peak in 1993.

The separate report, on teenage drug, alcohol and tobacco use, was the
annual Monitoring the Future survey of 8th, 10th and 12th graders, issued
by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Though finding overall illicit drug use largely unchanged this year from
last, it also found use of the drug ecstasy, a favorite at dance clubs,
increasing for the second straight year. And the number of high school
seniors using heroin hit its highest point since the survey began in 1975.
The survey, of 45,000 students, found that use of cocaine and hallucinogens
like LSD dropped this year, with marijuana use unchanged from 1999.

Alcohol use remained widespread though largely unchanged, with nearly three
in four high school seniors drinking at least once in the last year. The
corresponding numbers were two in three among 10th graders, and just over
40 percent among eighth graders.

Cigarette use dropped. Among seniors, for instance, 34.6 percent reported
smoking in the previous month on the 1999 survey, a figure that fell to
31.4 percent this year.