STUDY: DRUG USE DECLINING AMONG COLLEGE STUDENTS

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Gone are the days when college students could
say "everybody's doing it"--with the "it" referring to drug use, new study
findings suggest.

Drug use during the college years seems to be declining, researchers
report. And drug users are exhibiting distinctly different lifestyle
behaviors and values from those of their non-drug-using peers.

"It appears that drug use is becoming a little less 'mainstream' and a
little more 'deviant' on the campus than it was one or two decades ago,"
study lead author Dr. Harrison G. Pope, Jr., of Harvard Medical School in
Massachusetts, told Reuters Health.

Pope and his colleagues performed a 30-year study of various groups of
senior undergraduate students at a college in New England. The students
completed questionnaires in 1969, 1978, 1989 and 1999.

Findings show that the students' use of cocaine, LSD, opium and other drugs
peaked in 1978 and declined in subsequent years, the investigators report
in the September issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry. The one
exception was the increasing use of MDMA (Ecstasy) in later years, which
subsequently made the drug one of the most frequently tried illicit
substances, second only to marijuana, the authors note.

Differences between drug users and non-drug users also became more apparent
in later years, the report indicates.

Previously, such differences were limited to a greater number of
psychiatrist visits and higher levels of heterosexual activity among users
than non-users, and both of these factors remained significant in 1999,
findings show.

Nearly one quarter of college drug users reported having visited the
psychiatrist, compared with 15% of students who did not use drugs. More
than three quarters of college drug users reported sexual activity,
compared with less than half (43%) of non-drug users, the report indicates.

However, 1999 data also revealed that college drug users had worse grades
than their non-drug-using peers and that they spent less time participating
in extracurricular activities. College drug users were also more likely to
report homosexual activity than non-drug users.

Pope's findings conflict with national data, which shows that drug use
during the college years may actually be increasing, according to Susan
Foster of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia
University in New York. Foster was not involved with Pope's research.

While it is a "very interesting piece of research," she told Reuters
Health, it is equivalent to a case study because it involved students from
only one institution. Because of this, "(one) can't draw national
conclusions," she said.