TEENS FROWN MORE ON DRUGS, SURVEY FINDS

Attitude may forecast lower use

Teenage approval of marijuana and other illegal drugs has started
declining, with fewer adolescents saying they consider drug use ``cool,''
according to a national study being released today.

forty percent of teens surveyed agreed strongly that ``kids who are really
cool don't use drugs,'' compared with 35 percent who said so last year.

And the number agreeing strongly that ``in my school, marijuana users are
popular'' dropped to 10 percent, from 17 percent last year. Among younger
respondents, those 13 to 15 years old, only 8 percent said marijuana users
were popular, compared with 13 percent in 1998.

The shift is potentially significant because such changes in attitude have
become predictors of drug use. A government survey in August reported that
drug use was leveling off among teenagers. The new survey said
experimentation with marijuana declined to 41 percent of those surveyed,
compared with 42 percent in 1998 and 44 percent in 1997.

Experimentation with inhalants, methamphetamine, cocaine and LSD also
dropped. Trial use of the drug ``ecstasy'' did not.

Anti-drug campaign

The survey was commissioned by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, a
coalition of communications professionals who have created about 600
advertisements and commercials for a campaign that the government began to
discourage adolescents from using drugs.

The partnership stopped short of attributing the change in attitudes to its
role in the campaign, suggesting that the decline in social acceptance of
drugs had broader importance.

``Across the board, in numerous statistical measures, teenagers are
disassociating drugs from critically important badges of teen identity,''
said James Burke, the partnership's chairman.

``From a consumer-marketing standpoint, when this type of peer norm begins
to develop, it's extremely encouraging,'' Burke said. ``But it's too early
to declare a major turnaround on drug-related attitudes and drug use.''

Awareness of risks

Still, the study found teens more aware of drugs and the risks they pose.
forty-five percent of the adolescents interviewed said they had seen or
heard an ad against drugs at least once a day, compared with 32 percent in
1998, when the most-recent, $195 million campaign was getting under way.

The Partnership Attitude Tracking Study, as the annual survey is called,
was developed by Audits and Surveys Worldwide, a marketing research company
in New York. It asked 6,529 adolescents in seventh through 12th grades to
fill out a questionnaire on how they felt about drugs. The margin of error
was plus or minus 1.8 percentage points.

More than half the teenagers interviewed said they had been offered drugs.
But only 11 percent said it was difficult to reject a friend's invitation
to try marijuana, compared with 14 percent in the previous four years. And
41 percent of the teens said they had tried to talk a friend out of using
drugs, compared with 38 percent in 1998.

While some popular music has been criticized for glamorizing drugs, a
minority of the adolescents, or 42 percent, agreed that rock and rap stars
made drug use look tempting, compared with 48 percent in 1998.

In what the partnership called another encouraging development, 30 percent
of the teenagers said they had learned a lot about the risk of drugs from
their parents, compared with 27 percent last year. The government's
National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign has also used advertisements to
urge parents to talk with their children about the dangers of drug use.