SURVEY: DRUG USE ABOVE AVERAGE FOR LOCAL TEENAGERS

Ecstasy use varied most from average

The number of Hilton Head High School students who said they had used
Ecstasy, marijuana and hallucinogenic mushrooms was well above the national
average, according to a survey last school year. The survey was part of a
statewide effort to gauge risky behavior among 6th- through 12th-grade
students, including the use of illicit substances, violence and not
attending school. The S.C. Department of Education and the Department of
Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Services administered the survey to 54 of the
state's 85 school districts from late 2001 and early 2002.

The goal of the survey, said Dennis Nalty, the Director of Management
Information and Research for DAODAS, was to gauge trends at the state level
by questioning as many students as possible. Similar surveys were given out
statewide in 1990, 1993 and 1995, he said.

But Hilton Head High School's Principal Dr. Helen Ryan said the results
lacked credibility because she didn't think the students took the survey
seriously.

"I think one of the dangers of using a survey like that in school is that we
ask the (students) to do so many of them," she said. "I don't think it's a
valid survey at all."

Ryan said she was hopeful a survey planned for April by the University of
South Carolina that uses random sampling will yield more accurate results.
The smaller sample sizes will help ensure the quality of the results, she
said.

The results for a school the size of Hilton Head High School would probably
have a margin of error of less than 3 percent, Nalty said. However, the
survey was designed to identify state and county trends, he said, and the
results are more accurate with a larger sample size.

Nalty said DAODAS' broader approach to sampling is one of two ways --
stratified random sampling being the other -- of getting accurate results.
He said that "samples of convenience" that are based only on who wants to
participate aren't reliable, and that the state's approach was intended to
avoid this.

The survey went out to 6,825 Beaufort County public school students in sixth
through 12th grades. Nearly a third of the returned questionnaires were
discounted because they were incomplete or showed implausible results.
Implausible questionnaires include those marked with all yeses or all nos.
Other survey forms were discarded because they were physically damaged.

"It's impossible to read who filled out the survey frivolously," Nalty said.

Trying to compensate for this would do more harm that good, he said, and
it's better to discard the questionnaires that are in doubt.

Regardless of the margin of error, the survey would help spot trends, said
Dick Vallandingham, Director of Preventative Services of the Beaufort County
Alcohol and Drug Abuse Department.

Vallandingham worked with DAODAS to distribute the survey in Beaufort County
schools and said it's "state of the art."

"With most of your information you're looking for trends -- what's going up,
what's going down," he said.

This would help government agencies and non-profits identify the most
pressing needs among local youths, he said.

Ecstasy use was the category that varied most from national levels,
according to the October 2001 figures from Hilton Head. In the survey, 19
percent of 12th-graders said they had tried the drug. The national average
is 11 percent, according to the University of Michigan's Monitoring the
Future Study, which Nalty called the "gold standard" of risk behavior
studies.

Sixty percent of 12th-graders at Hilton Head High said they had smoked
marijuana, compared to 48 percent nationally. Fourteen percent said they had
used hallucinogenic mushrooms, compared to the 9 percent in the national
survey who said they had tried some kind of hallucinogenic drug other than
LSD.

Sixty-one percent of Hilton Head's class of 2002 said they had gotten drunk
on alcohol, 1 percent less than the national survey.

"These would be the categories of drugs that would be of concern in any
community in any part of the world today," Ryan said.

Most other areas were at or below national levels at Hilton Head High, as
were nearly all categories at Battery Creek and Beaufort High Schools, which
also participated.

"Alcohol, marijuana and Ecstasy are drugs of choice at Hilton Head High
School and to a lesser extent, hallucinogenic mushrooms," said Larry
McElynn, retired head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's
Philadelphia Division.

McElynn has given lectures to freshmen and seniors, usually in groups of 50,
at Hilton Head High School and three local private schools since 2000.

McElynn felt the statistics were in line with what he had heard in
conversations with students. And although the results are more than a year
old, he said they still should reflect current drug-use trends among the
student body.

As for a solution, McElynn said, "It's a parental responsibility."

"School districts are not the problem; they have an opportunity to help," he
said. "This is a much tougher issue in this community than anybody wants to
admit."

John Williams, Beaufort County School District spokesman, also said the
entire community needs to work toward a solution.

"It's one thing for the school to teach students not to use drugs; it's
another thing to have the students go out into the community and see adults
use these same drugs with little or no consequences, social or legal," he
said.

Ryan said the high school has an array of specialists on hand who can help
students with substance use and related problems, including five guidance
counselors, a behavior management specialist, a social worker and a school
nurse.

Health education curriculum spends a great deal of time educating children
on the dangers of using drugs, she said, and the school has also planned a
pre-prom assembly and other drug awareness presentations.