STUDY SEES SIGNS OF SLOWER GROWTH IN ILLEGAL DRUG USE

Drug Use Still Twice As Prevalent As In Early 1990s

There are signs that the increase in the use of illegal drugs in Finland
is reaching a plateau. According to a study by STAKES, the National
Research and Development Centre for Welfare and Health, the sharp
increase in the use of illegal drugs in the 1990s had stopped between
the years 1998 and 2000.

The figures are from a STAKES population survey.

According to the study which was released on Wednesday, one in ten Finns
admitted to having used or experimented with some illegal drug at least
once. Two percent said that they had used an illegal drug during the
past year. The results are similar to those in the previous study from
1998.

However, it would be premature to say that drug use is on its way out:
experimentation and use of drugs is still twice as prevalent now as it
was in 1992.

Cannabis remains the most popular illegal drug; more than nine percent
of respondents said that they had tried cannabis. Although the drug
ecstasy (MDMA) has been in the news frequently, only 0.6% of respondents
had used it.

Another interesting feature was that the use of cannabis seems to have
reached a plateau among those aged 15 to 29. This was particularly
evident in the Helsinki region, which has traditionally been a
front-runner in drug use in Finland. The trend would seem to be the same
in most parts of the country, with the exception of parts of southern
Finland outside the Helsinki area.

On the other hand, it is more common in the younger age groups to know
one or more people who use drugs.

Special researcher Pekka Hakkarainen notes that people usually learn
about drugs through other people they know. If a youngster's friends
have a positive attitude toward drugs the feelings of a non-drug user
can also go in the same direction.

The study does not reveal the whole truth of the drug issue in Finland:
many users of hard drugs, such as amphetamines and the opiates, are
homeless or institutionalised, and are therefore under-represented in
the figures.

There is also a language problem: most immigrants who do not have a
sufficient command of Finnish did not figure in the study. The study
also examined only those between the ages of 15 and 69, which obscured
much of the problem of solvent abuse: solvent sniffing is most frequent
among children under the age of 15.

The possible slowdown in the growth of drug use does not necessarily
mean that the need for drug treatment facilities will decrease, or that
deaths by drug overdose or drug-related crime would decline any time
soon.

According to Pekka Hakkarainen, drug use usually does not cause problems
in the early phases, which means that the real problems related to drug
use might grow even after the growth in experimentation stops.

Hakkarainen says that the results of the study reflect a trend that is
familiar in other countries as well. Drug use by British young people
has been going down, as has that among young Swedes. In Finland per
capita drug experimentation exceeded that of Sweden in the late 1990s.

STAKES is to publish a separate report later this year focusing on the
use of hard drugs. According to researcher Ari Virtanen the results are
similar to those in the study published on Wednesday: a certain plateau
seems to have been reached in the use of hard drugs as well.

"Still the problems caused by drug use are not decreasing any time soon.
Long-term damage, such as deaths from heroin overdoses, takes some time
to appear", Virtanen predicts.

The figures are based on a questionnaire answered by nearly 1800 people
last year. The questionnaire was part of a large survey on drinking
habits.