CHILDREN OF BABY BOOMERS TAKING POT USE TO NEW HIGH

OTTAWA - Marijuana is making a dramatic comeback among teens.

A national survey of 1,250 12-to-19 year olds revealed that getting high
is once again "mainstream," says a Health Canada representative.

The results suggest the greatest pot use among young people in 25 years.

Teen marijuana smokers appear to be imitating their baby-boom parents,
said Richard Garlick, a spokesman for the Canadian Centre for
Substance Abuse.

"Youth rates are going up and are at levels that we haven't seen since the
late '70s when rates reached their peak," said Garlick.

Health Canada gave a preliminary report of its findings last week to a
House of Commons committee holding hearings on a bill that would
decriminalize marijuana but stiffen penalties against grow operations.

"Research we have conducted on 12-to-19-year-olds shows us that
marijuana has gone mainstream and is well integrated into teen
lifestyle," reported Linda Dabros, a special adviser to Health
Canada's director general of drug strategy.

Fifty-four per cent of 15-to-19-year-olds said they had smoked up more than
once. When 12-to-14-year-olds were added to the mix, however, the overall
numbers dropped to 34 per cent.

Cigarette smoking, on the other hand, continues to decline among young
people, with the latest national figures showing that 22 per cent of
teens light up regularly.

Garlick calls his baby boomer theory an "attitudinal thing, that kids
who have been getting into cannabis use recently are children of the
baby boom and the notion there is that baby boomers don't have the same
kind of alarmist views that their parents might have had."

Other possible explanations, Garlick said, are that the supply has
steadily increased and, at the same time, the federal government put its
fight against drugs on a back-burner.

"We went to sleep on the issue and cannabis rates started coming up again."

The phone survey was conducted in August, with four-to-five followup
discussions online with participants.

Dabros said that teens appear to be confused about the state of the
federal pot law.

It is a criminal offence to smoke marijuana, but the federal Liberals
have proposed legislation to decriminalize possession of less than 15
grams so that people would be fined rather than criminally charged.

The survey is one of the first that the federal government has done in
a decade to measure the extent of Canada's drug problem. The Health
Department intends to use the data for an anti-marijuana campaign that is
being developed to prevent teens for smoking their first joint.

The last national survey involving young people and drugs, done in
1994, showed that one-third of 15-to-24- year-olds had tried pot.

Health Department spokeswoman Catherine Saunders said the government,
in the latest survey, questioned teens about how often they smoke
drugs, but that those figures are still to be analysed.

Bill Baker, president of the Ontario School Counsellors Association,
said he suspects that only a small minority of teens smoke marijuana
regularly and that it is not "just flaunted everywhere" in schools.

"I think it's very dependent on the school and the clientele at the
school," he said.

Provinces have done their own data in recent years showing that pot
use is climbing in high schools. Quebec's Institut de la Statistique
reported last year that nearly half of Quebec high school students have
smoked marijuana and about 20 per cent use it weekly.

A survey of Ontario high-school students, conducted by the Centre for
Addiction and Mental Health, also showed an upswing through the 1990s
after a large drop in the 1980s.

Of 4,894 students polled in 1999, 29.3 per cent said they had used
marijuana while 28.3 had smoked.

Addiction centres worry about the dangerous mix of drugs and alcohol,
considering that the numbers of teens who drink also appears to be
increasing, according to the Ontario survey.