STUDY FINDS DRUG USE UP IN YOUNG TEENS

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 14, 1993                   TAG: 9304140137
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium
STUDY FINDS DRUG USE UP IN YOUNG TEENS
In what some researchers warned could be the start of a worrisome new trend, an annual federally funded survey has found "significant" increases in the use of marijuana, cocaine, LSD, inhalants and other illicit substances among eighth-graders, most of whom are 13 or 14 years old.
The annual University of Michigan survey found that 11.2 percent of eighth-graders reported trying marijuana in 1992, a full percentage-point jump over a similar sample taken the previous year.
"It's really the first evidence of an increase in use among young people since 1986, when cocaine started to drop," said Lloyd Johnston, principal investigator of the survey.
Among high-school seniors, use of most drugs continued a downward trend. But the survey found seniors were increasingly less likely to view experimentation or even occasional use of illicit substances as dangerous, a potential harbinger of increases in use.
Calling the findings "troublesome," Johnston and other researchers attributed the results to a growing complacency about the problems of drug abuse, combined with a lack of attention to the issue by government and the media.
After all the fanfare over the drug problem in the late 1980s, "it's fallen into a black hole," Johnston said.
The survey, which anonymously sampled more than 50,000 eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders in public and private schools across the country, is widely regarded as one of the government's chief benchmarks for measuring progress in the drug war. In recent years, when the survey has recorded striking declines in drug use, its findings were released at a widely heralded Washington news conference attended by senior government officials and Cabinet members.
But Tuesday, the Department of Health and Human Services simply distributed a news release that included comments from Secretary Donna E. Shalala. Shalala said that while the survey showed "continued improvement among high-school seniors . . . we need to be sure that younger students are still learning the facts about drug and alcohol abuse."
As Shalala noted, the overall findings were a mixed bag. Among the 17,000 seniors surveyed, 25.1 percent reported having tried marijuana at least once in their lives, down from a peak of 58.7 percent in 1982.
Only 6.1 reported ever trying cocaine, down from a peak of 17.3 percent in 1975 when the survey of high-school seniors began.
LSD, a hallucinogen considered on the brink of a comeback last year, was unchanged at 8.6 percent of seniors having tried it once.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB