TEEN SURVEY: MORE USING DRUGS, ALCOHOL

ATLANTA - More teen-agers are using cocaine and regularly smoking and
drinking, but an increasing number are also wearing seat belts and
refusing to ride with a driver who's been drinking, according to a
survey released Thursday.

The annual survey, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention in schools across the country, examined the behavior of
13,600 high school students.

The survey found injury and violence-related behaviors have fallen,
but kids still regularly smoke and drink - nearly half said they'd
consumed more than one alcoholic beverage more than once in the month
before the survey.

The number of teen-agers who said they had tried cocaine in their
lifetime rose to 9.4 percent, up from 5.9 percent in 1991. About 4.2
percent of students said they had used cocaine in the past 30 days, up
from 1.7 percent in 1991.

"We still have plenty of work to do," said Laura Kann, a researcher
with the CDC's National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and
Health Promotion.

About 46 percent of teen-agers said they'd had sex, down from 54
percent in the 1991 survey. The percentage of sexually active
teen-agers who had used a condom increased from 46 percent to 58
percent from 1991 to 1999, but then remained there through 2001.

That points to a failure of "abstinence-only" sex-education programs
favored by the White House, said James Wagoner, president of Advocates
for Youth, a Washington nonprofit that supports both abstinence and
birth-control education for teen-agers.

"The implication is clear and yet, the current administration ignores
it. If you give young people information about how to protect
themselves, they use it," Wagoner said in a statement.

A separate survey of youths' risky behaviors by the University of
Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center found that a third of
900 teen-agers queried said they had either smoked cigarettes or
marijuana, drunk alcohol or gambled for money within the past 30 days.