This research examines drug use and abuse by teenagers. The research will set forth the context in which drugs-related issues have arisen in the culture and will discuss causes and strategies for prevention of teenage drug use.
There is a bewildering array of statistics associated with knowledge of teenage drug use, although cyclical patterns to teenagers' use of drugs were identified in the last two decades of the 20th century. In 1979, for example, 54.2% of high school seniors admitted to illicit drug use, while in 1992 only 27.1% did so. In 1997, the figure was at 42.4% (Teen, 1999). On the other hand, a 1995 study published by the Columbia University medical school reported that some two-thirds of American teenagers at least experiment with drugs before finishing high school, and that about one-third use an illicit drug besides marijuana: "One survey found that 7 percent used marijuana daily, 6 percent drank alcohol daily, and 20 percent smoked cigarettes every day" (Kelber, 1995, p. 141). In late 1999, the Parents' Resource Institute for Drug Education released results of a survey of more than 138,000 adolescents that charted evidence of a slight decline in the use of drugs in recent years:
Source: Parents' Resource Institute for Drug Education (PRIDE, 1999).
Despite evidence of statistical decline in the use of some drugs, there remains evidence of a persistent strand of drug-use behavior among adolescents. A study sponsored by the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research found that 55 percent of high school seniors admitted to experimenting with illegal drugs, with some 40 percent admitting to marijuana use, nearly 6 percent to inhalant use, 8 percent to LSD use, 6 percent to cocaine use, 1 percent to heroin use, and nearly 6 percent to use of the drug with the "street" name of Ecstacy (Schultz, 2000).
What Kleber (1999, p. 141) describes as "a clear-cut sequence" of drug use among adolescents has been id...