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New Survey Again Raises Alarm About Teen Drug Use, Attitudes "
A new report finds that more kids say they are using alcohol and other drugs, but many parents are unable or unwilling to deal with the issue -- a bad combination when declining support for prevention and cultural apathy about the issue leave parents as the last and sometimes only line of defense against adolescent drug use.
The 2009 Partnership Attitude Tracking Study (PATS), released March 2, 2010, by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America (PDFA) and MetLife Foundation, reported rather dramatic year-over-year spikes in past-month alcohol use (up 11 percent) and past-year use of marijuana (up 19 percent) and ecstasy (up 67 percent) among U.S. students in grades 9-12.
PDFA chairman and CEO Steve Pasierb noted that all three are "social drugs," and the survey of more than 3,200 students, conducted by Roper Public Affairs, found "a growing belief in the benefits and acceptability of drug use and drinking." For example, the percentage of teens agreeing that "being high feels good" increased from 45 percent in 2008 to 51 percent in 2009, and those who said "friends usually get high at parties" increased from 69 percent to 75 percent. Thirty percent of students surveyed strongly agreed that they "don't want to hang around drug users," down from 35 percent in 2008.
"The resurgence in teen drug and alcohol use comes at a time when pro-drug cues in popular culture – in film, television and online – abound, and when funding for federal prevention programs has been declining for several years," according to a PDFA press release on the survey.
About 20 percent of the parents surveyed by PATS believed that their children had gone beyond the experimental phase in use of alcohol or other drugs. However, almost half of these parents either did not take any action (25 percent) or waited for between a month and a year to address the perceived problem (22 percent).
Parents of children engaging in non-experimental drug use were less confident in their ability to influence their kids' drug-use decisions, according to the survey, and were more likely to believe that all teens will experiment with drugs and that occasional use of alcohol or marijuana is tolerable.
"Parents with drug-using kids have never been served by our field," said Pasierb. "They're the outliers, and they should be the focus." PDFA has developed a program called Time to Act that is designed to improve parental knowledge about teen alcohol and other drug use, set rules and boundaries, intervene when necessary, and seek outside help when needed.
"Government prevention programs have all been defunded, and society is not on our side. It's all on the parents now," said Pasierb. "Parents are convinced that their kids are getting all this (drug prevention) in school, and it's just not true. The doctor, school, or football coach is not going to step in."
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