HALF OF YOUTH SURVEYED HAVE TRIED MARIJUANA

Calling themselves Team Soapbox, seven youth recently completed a high
school retention project that included surveying youth and collecting
data.

Caitlin Bryant, Junior Luaifoa, Mike Jacques, Rachelle Spencer, Karen
Kimball, Robbie Holmgren and coordinator Erin Hasler spent from
October 2002 to March 2003 working on the project, which was funded by
Youth Services Canada through Career Link.

Team Soapbox started researching the dropout rate in the North Island
region--which includes Powell River--to learn what influences students
to leave school early. Individuals, community groups and organizations
were surveyed.

One of the components of Team Soapbox's project was to make a
presentation to students about the importance of completing high school.

In the project's executive summary, Lyn Adamson, program director of
Career Link, noted how Team Soapbox met with a "great deal" of
resistance to making the Stay in School presentations. "Two schools
chose not to have the team attend at all, defending their decisions
because they felt that there wasn't a dropout problem in their
environment," she said.

As part of the survey a wide range of questions was asked on a variety
of issues team members believed affect the dropout rate. Issues ranged
from bullying to drugs to teen pregnancy to homework overload.

The following questions asked were to 381 youth about drugs. This is
what they said:

192 50% have tried or use pot

94 25% have tried or use mushrooms

45 12% have tried or use acid

52 14% have tried or use ecstasy

44 12% have tried or use cocaine

15 4% have tried or use heroin

Out of 242 students in grade eight and nine who completed the
survey:

99 41% responded yes to having tried or used
pot

Of those:

16 7% use pot daily

40 17% use pot weekly or sometimes

43 18% had tried it