Prohibition has nothing to do with protecting children and everything to do with protecting marijuana prohibition.)

April 8, 1999

From The New York Times
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By Christopher Wren

DRUG SURVEY OF CHILDREN FINDS MIDDLE SCHOOL A PIVOTAL TIME

The first national drug-abuse survey to include elementary-school children among the respondents suggests that youngsters become more vulnerable to the lure of drugs once they leave the familiar environment of primary school and strive to fit into middle school.

The new survey, by Pride, an organization based in Atlanta that counsels schools and parents on ways to inhibit drug use among the young, also confirms again what many researchers have long known: that cigarettes, alcohol (primarily beer) and inhalants are used far more by children than are marijuana or harder drugs.

Pride—the name is an acronym for the National Parents’ Resource Institute for Drug Education—issued its findings yesterday at its national conference in Cincinnati. Until now, drug-abuse surveys among children did not focus on those below the eighth grade. But Pride’s survey questioned pupils from Grade 4 through Grade 6, and among the findings were these:

The proportion of respondents who said they had smoked cigarettes in the last month jumped to 7 percent of sixth graders from 1.6 percent of fourth graders. Similarly 2.1 percent of fourth graders said they drank beer at least once a month, fewer than half the 4.7 percent of sixth graders who reported doing so. Monthly sniffing of glue and other inhalants also rose between the grades, although less so: to 2.7 percent of sixth graders from 2.2 percent of fourth graders.

As for marijuana, only 0.4 percent of fourth-grade pupils acknowledged having smoked it in the last month, as against 1.7 percent of sixth graders.

In discussing their findings, officials of Pride also cited previous research, for the National Institute on Drug Abuse, indicating that children’s risk of engaging in drug use rises when they move from elementary school to middle—which, depending on the district, begins in Grade 5, 6 or 7 -- and later from middle school to high school. Peer pressure and association with new friends appear to be leading causes.

Although marijuana use among the survey’s respondents was far less common than their beer drinking or cigarette smoking, the director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy noted a sharp jump in monthly marijuana smoking from fifth graders (0.6 percent) to sixth (1.7 percent).

(Marijuananews note: Why did Wren begin this section with an "Although?" Is this "Although" as in the Czar’s emphasis is strangely misplaced, or "Although" as in His Highness pointed out the real danger? I would like to think that it is the former, but one is left to draw one’s own inferences.)

"The reported dramatic increase of marijuana use between the fifth and sixth grades," said the director, Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, retired, "is a real wake-up call to parents. We have got to get the word out that the pre-teen years are the key transition period where parents can play a critical role."

The findings were based on responses from 26,086 pupils at public and private schools in 22 states during the 1997-98 school year. Pride sent a questionnaire to the participating schools with instructions for administering it, and all answers were anonymous.

Doug Hall, a Pride spokesman, said the researchers had used a test-retest method in which the pupils were asked the same questions twice within a two-week period to catch any statistical inconsistencies. But the schools had all volunteered to participate in the survey, making them somewhat less representative than a broader nationwide sample would have been.

The researchers found that the children interviewed, who ranged in age from 9 to 12, seemed to overestimate the number of friends and classmates who smoked cigarettes, drank beer or experimented with marijuana. For example, 14 percent of sixth graders said they believed that their friends had smoked marijuana, but fewer than 4 percent admitted having tried it themselves at some point.

"This misperception alone—that everybody’s doing it—can be a powerful motivator behind much of the drug use we see," said Thomas J. Gleaton, the president of Pride. "Youth need an accurate portrayal of drug use that begins with correcting the misperception that everyone is doing it."

The nation’s foremost annual survey of drug use by the young, Monitoring the Future, at the University of Michigan, questions eighth graders and up. It asks when they first began using drugs, and their answers indicate the same leap in experimentation between elementary school and middle school.

In 1997, the latest year measured, just 0.9 percent of eighth graders said they had first tried marijuana in the fourth grade, 4.2 percent in the sixth grade.

Similarly 8.3 percent said they had begun drinking alcohol in the fourth grade, and 12 percent in the sixth grade. And 7.8 percent said they had started smoking cigarettes in the fourth grade, and 12.4 percent in the sixth grade.

In December, the Michigan survey reported that in 1997 marijuana use, after rising for six years, began to decline slightly among 10^th and 12^th graders and failed to increase among 8^th graders. This raised hopes that prevention messages were finally paying off.