COCAINE USE SOARS AMONG STATE YOUTH, SURVEY FINDS

Cocaine use tripled among Massachusetts middle school students and doubled
among high school students in the past three years, according to a report
issued yesterday, signaling the resurgence of a drug that counselors
believed had been in decline for a decade.

The Department of Public Health surveyed more than 3,000 adolescents
earlier this year and found that 5.6 percent of middle school students and
5.8 percent of high school students had used cocaine during the preceding
month, figures that spurred an immediate reaction from the report's authors.

''Once I got these numbers,'' said Teresa Anderson, director of statistics
in the agency's Bureau of Substance Abuse Services, ''the first thing I did
was walk down the hall to the office of the director of prevention and talk
about how we can turn this around.''

Counselors and treatment specialists interviewed yesterday said cocaine has
been reappearing at the street level as teenagers pursue a quicker - and
often cheaper - high. In many respects, they say, the surge in cocaine use
is a classic case of market-driven economics: As designer ''club drugs''
such as Ecstasy flooded the streets and commanded a growing share of the
drug business, cocaine dealers responded by slashing the price on their
product. The result was a buying binge by adolescents.

''It's climbing in use, all right - going off the roof, really,'' said Bill
Phillips, program director for New Beginnings, a drug prevention initiative
in Framingham. ''It's like guns and butter. If a drug is there for the
right price, it's going to be taken and if it's not, they'll go to
something else. Cocaine is just easier to get now.''

The same study reported decreases in use of alcohol and club drugs and
found that while marijuana use has risen among middle school students since
1999, it dropped in high school.

The survey, which included students at 50 middle schools and 50 high
schools across the state, found that the average middle school student
began drinking alcohol at a slightly older age than in 1999, between the
ages of 11 and 12 rather than between 9 and 10.

Still, one in five middle school students reported that they'd had a drink
during the month before they were surveyed, while half of the high school
students reported that they had consumed alcohol during the same period.

In almost every major category, Massachusetts adolescents were more likely
to engage in substance abuse than their peers nationally or elsewhere in
the Northeast. Anderson attributed that, in part, to the state being on a
well-identified drug trafficking route.

The most striking findings in the report involved cocaine use - findings
that counselors believe may, paradoxically, result from more stringent
enforcement of alcohol laws.

''It's much harder for a kid these days to walk into a liquor store and get
booze,'' said Coco Wellington, director of dual diagnosis and addiction
recovery services at Advocates Community Counseling in Marlborough and
Framingham. ''But you can just walk up to any dealer on the street for
cocaine or your buddy has it. Cocaine is simply the drug of choice right now.''

Specialists such as Wellington, as well as law enforcement authorities,
said yesterday that drug use is often cyclical, with price and availability
influencing which substance is in ascendance. Several counselors said that
this year's cocaine use closely mirrors that seen in the late 1980s and
early 1990s, during the heyday of crack.

The preferred form of cocaine - powder or crack - appears to vary among
geographic regions in the state. In Waltham, a drug counselor said the drug
is more commonly inhaled as a powder, whereas in Springfield it is
generally smoked as crack. Whatever the form, counselors said, a perception
persists among adolescents that cocaine is safer, and less addictive, than
other drugs, especially injected drugs such as heroin.