STUDY FINDS DECLINE IN TEEN SUBSTANCE USE

Mild Changes Suggest Reversal of '90s Trend

Teenage use of marijuana, alcohol and cigarettes dropped slightly across
all age groups and most adolescents reported a greater awareness of the
risks associated with those activities, according to an annual federal
survey of high school students released yesterday.

Through most of the 1990s, the survey, known as Monitoring the Future
Study, showed steady increases in cigarette smoking and alcohol and drug
abuse among teenagers. Last year, the survey showed those trends leveling
off, and this year for the first time there are indications that they might
be reversing direction.

"We are still at this tilt point where things are moving in the right
direction but not necessarily by great magnitude," said Lloyd D. Johnston,
who heads the survey team at the University of Michigan's Institute for
Social Research.

The survey results were greeted by administration officials as a modest
cause for hope. "Not a lot," said Secretary of Health and Human Services
Donna E. Shalala. "And not nearly as much as we want. But enough to say
we're making a little bit of a dent in a very big problem."

The study has been tracking teenage drug use since 1975. For this year's
survey, a nationally representative sample of nearly 50,000 students in
eighth, 10th and 12th grades in public and private schools completed a
self-administered questionnaire.

For the first time in the 1990s, the survey recorded declines in cigarette
smoking by respondents at all three grade levels. Johnston said he believes
that publicity about lawsuits against tobacco companies and the
administration's efforts to enact national tobacco legislation cast greater
attention on the adverse consequences of cigarette smoking and helped
change attitudes among young people.

The survey results on marijuana were especially important, Shalala said,
because it is the most widely used drug among teenagers and it accounted
for most of the increase in overall illicit drug use by adolescents this
decade. This year's survey found slight decreases in marijuana use in all
three of the grades, with a reported decline among eighth-graders for the
second year in a row.

Barry R. McCaffrey, director of the White House Office of National Drug
Control Policy, said, "The 1998 study shows that we have turned the tide of
youth drug use."

Most of the declines in overall illicit drug use were less than 1
percentage point, barely enough to be statistically significant. The survey
also showed that nearly a quarter of eighth-graders and about half of all
high school seniors said they had tried marijuana -- figures that are much
higher than a few years ago.

Taking a more cautious approach than McCaffrey, Shalala said, "The bottom
line is that we have not achieved victory -- and I am not declaring it."

The mixed picture was evident among the students who reported regular
recent marijuana use. Among eighth-graders, 9.7 percent said they had used
marijuana in the month proceeding the 1998 survey. Although that was a drop
from last year's 10.2 percent, the figure was 3.2 percent in 1992.

As marijuana use increased in the mid-1990s, the number of adolescents
reporting that they perceived risks in the drug decreased. In the past two
years, this perception seems to have changed toward a greater appreciation
of the risks, most clearly among the youngest teenagers.

With the exception of crack and powder cocaine, which are used by
relatively few teenagers but nonetheless showed slight increases, the use
of other drugs such as LSD and heroin showed signs of leveling off or
declining.

The survey had showed increased use of alcoholic beverages in recent years,
but in 1998 it registered slight declines at all age levels, although
one-third of all high school seniors reported being drunk at least once in
the month before the survey.

"These behaviors sometimes change very slowly, and often only after there
has been some reassessment by young people of how dangerous these various
drugs are," Johnston said. "Such a reassessment now appears to be occurring
for many drugs, very gradually."

Checked-by: Richard Lake