Drug Use Up Among Younger Teens, Survey Says

By CHRISTOPER S. WREN

While the popularity of marijuana and other drugs appears to be leveling
off among older high school students, more of their younger brothers and
sisters are experimenting with illicit drugs, according to the country's
largest survey of adolescent drug use.

The findings released Tuesday by Pride, an organization based in Atlanta
that works with schools and parents to discourage youthful drug use,
contradicts some key findings in an earlier annual survey for the
Department of Health and Human Services. The government study, called the
National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, reported in August that the number
of teenagers using drugs in the previous month had dropped to 9 percent in
1996, from 10.9 percent in 1995.

But Pride, an acronym for Parents' Resource Institute for Drug Education,
said that more students in the sixth through eighth grades admitted to
using drugs, though drug use in high school had stabilized.

It reported that 11.4 percent of the students in junior high school used
drugs once a month, compared to 10.9 percent in the previous year. Among
high school students surveyed, 24.6 percent said they had done so, compared
with 24.2 percent the previous year, a rise that is statistically
insignificant.

The disparities in the two surveys illustrates the difficulty of getting
children, as well as adults, to be candid about what is, after all, an
illegal activity. The government relies on such surveys to form policies to
reduce the demand for drugs.

"It's now literally at age 10 where you can see the onslaught of drugs,"
said the White House's drug policy director, Barry McCaffrey, who appeared
at Pride's news conference in Washington Tuesday. But McCaffrey added,
"There's a shred of good news that drug use is stabilizing among older kids."

The Clinton administration is budgeting $195 million for a new national
advertising blitz to discourage adolescents from using illegal drugs.
McCaffrey said in a telephone interview that he hoped to see the first
commercials and advertisements in December.

Pride conducted its survey by supplying junior and senior high schools in
28 states with anonymous questionnaires that teachers distributed to more
than 141,077 students between September 1996 and June 1997. The number of
schools participating can vary from year to year, throwing into question
the precision of the findings. Schools that agree to cooperate may also be
less anxious about their drug problem than schools that decline.

The government's survey based its findings on interviews conducted with
18,269 adults and children in their homes. Some critics of the survey say
not only is the sample smaller but also that interviewing teenagers about
drugs at home where parents may be within earshot inhibits candor.

Mark Weber, a spokesman for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration, which conducts the national household survey, attributed
its conclusion that youthful drug use had not only leveled off but declined
to the use of different methodologies from those employed in the Pride survey.

Pride's findings have been more consistent with yet another annual survey
of adolescents and drugs, called Monitoring the Future, by the Institute of
Social Research at the University of Michigan. The institute's detailed
study of about 50,000 students in the eighth, 10th and 12th grades at 430
schools around the country is widely considered the most authoritative and
is conducted for the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Its new findings
will be released in December.

The Pride survey breaks fresher ground in evaluating the link between use
of drugs and other deviant behavior. It found, for example, that a third of
junior high school students who brought a gun to class had also tried
cocaine, compared with less than 2 percent for those who had never carried
a gun.

Eric Wish, the director of the Center for Substance Abuse Research at the
University of Maryland, pointed out that rising drug use tended to be
reported more accurately than declines. "When you find an increase in these
drug surveys, they usually do reflect that something's going on, because
the bias is so much toward underreporting use."

There has been other evidence that youthful marijuana use is increasing. In
Washington, D.C., 72 percent of juveniles arrested last August tested
positive for marijuana, compared with an average of just 6 percent in 1990.

Wish cautioned against making comparisons between high school seniors and
eighthgrade students, without taking into account the drug users who
dropped out.