Survey Suggests Leveling Off In Use of Drugs by Students

Though older high school students are reportedly still smoking marijuana in
increasing numbers, their flirtation with other illegal drugs appears to be
slowing, and drug use among eighth graders has stopped climbing for the
first time in more than five years.The findings, compiled by the Survey
Research Center at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and announced by
President Clinton yesterday, offered the first encouraging evidence since
1992 that adolescent drug use, which started rebounding months before he
moved into the White House, could be leveling off.

Among the 18,600 eighth graders interviewed for the survey, called
Monitoring the Future, 29.4 percent said they had tried an illegal drug,
usually marijuana, at least once, compared with 31.2 percent last year and
28.5 percent in 1995.

"What's happening is that eighth graders are beginning to get very clear
messages, first from their parents, then from their teachers and from the
rest of us, that these drugs are dangerous," Donna Shalala, the Secretary
of Health and Human Services, said on Friday at an advance briefing at the
White House.

The eighth graders in the survey also expressed somewhat more disapproval
of drug users than their predecessors did last year. Such attitudes are
significant as a harbinger of drug use in subsequent years.

The survey confirmed that alcohol remained a bigger problem among
teenagers than illegal drugs. Thirtyone percent of high school seniors,
25 percent of sophomores and 15 percent of eighth graders admitted to binge
drinking, defined as consuming five or more drinks in a row, on one
occasion or more in the previous two weeks. That is well below the peak
year of 1983, when 41 percent of seniors said that they had become drunk in
the previous two weeks. The New York Times, December 21, 1997

Mr. Clinton cited the survey in his weekly radio address yesterday, saying
that the increasing rates of teenage drug use were leveling off and, in
some cases, decreasing.

"Today's eighth graders are less likely to have used drugs over the past
year, and just as important, they are more likely to disapprove of drug
use," the President said. "This change in attitudes represents a glimmer of
hope in our efforts to protect our children from drugs. But our work is far
from over." The findings will also help Mr. Clinton refute Republican
criticism that he has allowed adolescent drug use to soar in his White
House tenure. In its latest drugfighting measure, his Administration has
budgeted $195 million for an advertising campaign on television and radio
and in print to discourage adolescents from using illegal drugs. The
national blitz will get under way next month.

"Our goal," Mr. Clinton said, "is to make sure that every time a child
turns on the TV, listens to the radio or surfs the Internet, he or she will
get the powerful message that drugs can destroy your life."

The Monitoring the Future survey annually tracks drug use by successive
cohorts, or peer groups, of adolescents in the 8th, 10th and 12th grades.
The principal researcher, Lloyd D. Johnston, said the findings were more
complex this year because not all drug use had moved in the same direction
and not all grade levels showed the same shifts.

"It certainly is giving evidence of deceleration and leveling, and that's
good news after the last five or six years," Dr. Johnston said in a
telephone interview from Ann Arbor. "Clearly, the best news is what's going
on with eighth graders."

A Government survey released in August also found drug use slightly down
among younger adolescents. The more comprehensive Monitoring the Future
survey seems to confirm that the "slope," or upward trend line, in drug
experimentation by teenagers may be flattening out.

"It is hard to understate the importance that the slope of the curve has
changed," Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, the director of national drug policy,
said at Friday's briefing.

Nevertheless, the rate of drug experimentation remains several times higher
than in the early 1990's, though it is well below the peak year of 1979.
Dr. Johnston attributed the swing to cycles of what he called "generational
forgetting," in which children reaching their teenage years have yet to
learn the consequences of drug use that their elders experienced. As a
result, keeping youths off drugs has become a ceaseless battle.

Up to 90 percent of the teenagers who use drugs reported smoking
marijuana. Nearly half of the seniors who graduated from high school in
June admitted to having tried marijuana at least once, compared with 45
percent last year. And 5.8 percent of the graduating seniors said they
smoked marijuana daily in the previous month, compared with 4.9 percent
last year. Nine out of 10 seniors, many nonusers among them, said marijuana
was easy to obtain.

But experimenting with harder drugs among the seniors rose more modestly,
with 8.7 percent this year saying they had tried powder cocaine at some
point, compared with 7.1 percent last year. And 2.1 percent of the seniors
said they had tried heroin, compared with 1.8 percent last year. Because
the heroin figure is so low, the rise may not be statistically significant,
Dr. Johnston said.

Among eighthgrade students, experimentation with heroin dropped, to 2.1
percent from 2.4 last year. The number trying cocaine at least once also
fell, but barely, to 4.4 percent from 4.5. Experiments with stimulants and
hallucinogens like LSD also rose slightly for high school seniors, while
remaining flat for 10th graders and declining for 8th graders.

Only 26 percent of seniors said they disapproved of people who took a drink
or two of beer, wine or liquor, while 51 percent expressed the same
disapproval about experimenting with marijuana.

The survey also reported that more young men than young women used illegal
drugs.

The Monitoring the Future survey is conducted for the National Institute of
Drug Abuse, one of the National Institutes of Health. It is widely regarded
as the most accurate assessment of illegal drug use by teenagers.
Distributing anonymous selfadministered classroom questionnaires, the
researchers surveyed 51,000 students at 429 public and private secondary
schools from February to May 1997.