Illicit drugs still used by American teenagers

The problem of drug use in American teens has been on a decrease but the situation still needs a lot of attention to eradicate it completely.

A survey has shown that in the past decade the number of illegal drug users amongst the teenagers in U.S. has reduced but still there are many teenagers who find the use of drugs as a source of pleasure and are using illegal prescriptions to get hold of drugs.

An annual report on drugs usage by teenagers in U.S. has been issued by the White House and U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse. It contains the results of a survey that was conducted on around 48,000 students in 8th, 10th and 12th grades from 403 different public and private schools in U.S.

The results of the survey conducted by University of Michigan show that the decline in drug use is the maximum in eighth grade students while the other two grade students have also showed a falling trend in the illicit drug usage. There was around 1.6% decrease in 2007 in eighth grade users as compared to 2006.

"The cumulative declines since recent peak levels of drug involvement in the mid-1990s are quite substantial, especially among the youngest students," said Lloyd Johnston, a researcher at University of Michigan.

According to the data which was collected in an earlier survey in 1997, the drug usage has reduced a lot. In 10th grade, the percentage of users decreased from 39% to 28% and amongst the 12th grade it decreased from 42% to 36%.

President Bush was quick to praise the efforts of his Government to capture the drug usage in the teenage population. He said the anti-drug policy of his Government is showing its results.

"On the one hand we'll interdict and prevent and disrupt drug supply networks. And on the other hand, we'll work to convince people they shouldn't use drugs in the first place and those that have, there's recovery programs for you," he said.

The most widely used drug was still Marijuana. Amongst the other drugs used by the teenagers, various stimulants including amphetamines, Ritalin (prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), methamphetamine, often called "meth," and crystal methamphetamine, are the ones which are primarily responsible for the downtrend. The usage of these has reduced considerably.

Survey also found that the consumption of the drugs like cocaine, crack cocaine, LSD, other hallucinogens, heroin and many prescription drugs used for nonmedical purposes such as the painkillers OxyContin and Vicodin has not shown any change in the last year. Around 2 to 5 percent of the students in all the tree grades use cocaine.

One major area of concern is Ecstasy, which is the non medical use of the prescribed medicines as illegal drugs. The data shows that although the trends of the use of Ecstasy amongst teenagers fell in the start of this decade but the teens have again used started using it for pleasure. In the 10th grade students, the usage has increased from 2.4% in 2004 to 3.5% in the past 12 months.

This research is an eye opener. The efforts that are being made in order to curb the use of drugs are moving in the right direction but still more sincere and dedicated approach is required in order to eradicate this problem completely. Government should start more intense education campaigns and should also make strict rules to ensure that students don’t get access to non-prescribed medicine.