14.12.10

Marijuana, Ecstasy Use Increases Among US Teens

medicalnewstoday.com  Article Date: 14 Dec 2010 - 11:00 PST
The use of illicit drugs like marijuana and ecstasy among US teens has increased according to a government-sponsored survey, raising concerns about whether the current debates on drug legalization may be sending the wrong message to young Americans.

The survey found that due mostly to an increase in marijuana use, the proportion of eighth-graders (children around 13 and 14 years of age) who said they had used an illicit drug in the past year has risen from 14.5 per cent in 2009 to 16 per cent in 2010.
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The Monitoring the Future (MTF) Survey is a classroom survey of eighth-, 10th-, and 12th-graders that is done every year: the results for 2010 were announced today in a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington DC.

The 2010 MTF survey also found significant increases in use of Ecstasy and that the nonmedical use of prescription drugs remains high among American teenagers.

This year the survey covered 46,482 students from 396 public and private schools. Since 1975 it has included measures on drug, alcohol and cigarette use, and also attitudes towards these substances among 12th-graders across the nation. The survey added eighth and 10th-graders in 1991.

The survey generally asks participants about their drug use in the past month, the past year, and in their lifetime.

The 2010 findings show that on some measures, marijuana use appears to be outstripping use of cigarretes among 12th-graders (the final year of high school, when children graduate at age 17 or 18). 21.4 per cent of this group said they had used marijuana in the past 30 days, compared with 19.2 per cent who said they smoked cigarettes.

The trend toward increasing marijuana use is apparent in most measures across all three grades.

For instance, among eighth-graders, daily use of marijuana rose from 1.0 to 1.2 per cent from 2009 to 2010, among 10th-graders it went up from 2.8 to 3.3 per cent, while among 12th-graders it shot up from 5.2 to 6.1 per cent.

NIDA Director Dr Nora D. Volkow told the press that:

"These high rates of marijuana use during the teen and pre-teen years, when the brain continues to develop, place our young people at particular risk."

"Not only does marijuana affect learning, judgment, and motor skills, but research tells us that about 1 in 6 people who start using it as adolescents become addicted," she added.

The 2010 MTF survey also shows a signficant rise in the number of teenagers who say they use Ecstasy (or MDMA). This has gone up from 1.3 per cent of eighth-graders in 2009 to 2.4 per cent in 2010, and 2.7 per cent of 10th-graders in 2009 to 4.7 per cent in 2010.

Another area of concern is that the downward trend in cigarette smoking appears to have reached a plateau in all three grades after several years of steady decline on most measures.

Prompted by an increase in the marketing of alternative forms of tobacco, the 2010 MTF survey for the first time included measures for 12th-graders on use of small cigars (23.1 per cent) and smoking tobacco with a "hookah" pipe (17.1 per cent).

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/211465.php

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