ATTITUDES AFFECT WHO USES MARIJUANA, SURVEY FINDS

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Attitudes toward drug use strongly affect whether
teen-agers use marijuana, researchers said Tuesday.

Marijuana use among high school students soared in the 1970s, fell in the
1980s and is creeping back up again in the 1990s. Jerald Bachman and
colleagues at the University of Michigan say attitudes are the reason.

``The overwhelming factor was the student's attitude, whether they thought
it was dangerous,'' Bachman, a social psychologist, said in a telephone
interview.

Bachman's team looked at written surveys of more than 140,000 high school
students, done from 1976 through 1996.

The students were asked whether they used marijuana and what their attitudes
toward the drug were, among other things.

Students who were religious, who made good grades, who did not skip school
and who did not go out much at night were much less likely to use marijuana.
This held true in the 1970s, the 1980s and the 1990s.

But there were big variations in overall marijuana use over time. ``For
example, a 12th grader in 1978 was fully three times as likely to be a
current marijuana user (defined as any use in the past 30 days) as a 12th
grader in 1992,'' the researchers wrote in a report in the American Journal
of Public Health. ''Why did its popularity fluctuate so much?''

``Attitudes about specific drugs -- disapproval of use and perceptions of
risk or harmfulness -- are among the most important determinants of actual
use,'' the researchers wrote.

Teen-agers in the 1980s were much more likely to say they disapproved of
marijuana use, or to know about the dangers of marijuana, than teen-agers in
the 1970s, Bachman said.

Bachman said he believed the surveys accurately reflected whether the
teen-agers were actually taking drugs. Past analysis showed the respondents
were answering truthfully, and were not just giving answers they thought
interviewers wanted to read.

Bachman, who has studied drug use by teen-agers for 30 years, said education
campaigns did work. He said schools, politicians and the media had hit hard
on drugs in the 1980s, but talked about them less now.

``They have become complacent, yes,'' he said. High-profile deaths of young
athletes who took cocaine in the 1980s helped scare teen-agers off that
drug, he said. And in the early 1980s teen-agers could see fellow students
who were ''burned out'' by marijuana use.

He also said the attitude toward the individual drug was important. Cocaine
use and marijuana use did not parallel one another -- indicating that it was
knowledge of the drug itself, and not overall attitudes about drugs in
general, that was important.

Checked-by: Melodi Cornett