DRUG USE BY YOUNG LEVELS OFF

SURVEY

Alcohol remains a bigger problem among teenagers than illegal narcotics,a
study finds.

Through older high school students are still smoking marijuana in
increasing numbers,their flirtation with other illegal drugs appears to be
slowing, and drug use among eighthgraders has stopped climbing for the
first time in more than five years.

The findings, compiled be the Survey Research Center at the University of
Michigan at Ann Arbor, and announced by President Clinton on Saturday,
offered the first evidence since 1992 that adolescent drug use, which
started rebounding months before Clinton moved into the White House, could
be leveling off.

Among the 18,600 eighthgraders 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 eighthgraders 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 Friday at an advance White House
briefing.

The eighthgraders 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 eighthgraders 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 the figure for seniors hit 41 percent.

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

"Today's eighthgraders 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 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 ad 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," 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 eighth, 10th and 12the
grades. The principal researcher, Lloyd 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.