DRUGS AND YOUNG PEOPLE

It is always wise to treat with some caution the findings of those
medicosocial surveys which are based on questionnaires. It is also wise to
be cautious in the interpretation of studies that examine populations from
different social cultures, and crosscultural questionnaires can be further
confounded by language disparities. That said, the organisers, researchers
and authors of the ESPAD report (The European School Survey Project on
Alcohol and Other Drugs), published last week, have gone to great pains to
try to ensure that the findings reported from 26 different European
countries are comparable across languages and cultures and valid for each
country surveyed.

The findings in Ireland seem to be further validated by the responses of
those in this country who work closely with young people and are not
surprised by the data which place Irish teenagers near the top of the
European league in terms of the use of tobacco, alcohol and certain illegal
drugs such as cannabis and ecstasy. Validation is also available from
certain other studies here which, while not always exactly comparable with
the ESPAD study, indicate similar high levels of the use of tobacco and
mindaltering substances by young people. It seems reasonable to accept,
therefore, that Irish schoolgoers are more familiar than most (but not
all) of their European peers with smoking and drinking and some drugtaking.

But the report's findings are more quantitative than qualitative and it is
far from easy to draw from them conclusions that could lead to positive or
preventive actions. Further research will be required to answer the most
central of several questions thrown up by the report: why should Irish
teenagers be more active in this area than many other Europeans of their
age? Why should they drink more, or get more drunk (a social phenomenon
which can now be seen on the streets of even small provincial towns at
weekends) than kids in many other European countries? Why is it that the
messages about the lethal hazards of cigarette smoking are either not
getting through to them or are being ignored by them?

Speculation on these and other questions can be endless. Some have
suggested that our young people lack a coherent value system. It can as
easily be argued that they may be following parental example, or even that
they are more vigorous than other European teenagers in rebelling against
parental advice and behaviour. Adolescence has always been a problematic
period for some of those who are trying to assert their own individuality,
but the "normal" problems can be greatly and permanently compounded by the
presence or use of addictive substances such as tobacco where the toll on
health and life itself is not payable until much later in life than most
teenagers can envisage or identify.

It would be interesting to see a breakdown of the geographic and
socioeconomic distribution of the schools in which the questionnaires were
answered. The virtual absence from the findings of such "hard" drugs as
heroin, which have so devastated whole communities in deprived urban areas,
is remarkable. Also interesting in the Irish context is the predominance,
in the young people's answers, of the negative consequences of drinking
alcohol, notwithstanding the relatively high levels of drinking identified.
No one, apparently, was able to note a positive consequence of drinking.
And nobody appears to have been asked where the money came from to support
the behaviours described.

The researchers deserve thanks for drawing attention to what is clearly a
significant phenomenon. That they have raised more questions than
identifiable solutions was bound to be the case, given the nature of the
research they undertook. Further, more targeted research is now required so
that speculation does not take over from information in determining what
actions may be desirable or beneficial.