I talk to you today not as a group of children who are uninformed about the problems of drug use and drug abuse among yourselves and your peers, but, rather, as someone who believes you are more intelligent than most of our efforts to dissuade you from using drugs. Many of the present media campaigns designed to educate you about drugs use scare tactics or exaggerate the harmful effects of the use of some drugs, particularly marijuana, to the point where you know better than to believe them. However, regardless of these previous attempts to help you steer clear of the dangers that result from the use and abuse of drugs, the fact remains, and I am sure it is a fact of which many of you are aware on a personal basis, that many of you and your peers still choose to use and abuse drugs-particularly the dangerous drugs on which I am focusing today: alcohol; cocaine; heroin; inhalants. Where these potentially life-destroying drugs are concerned, the facts are clear that you all still choose to use them to a frightening degree:
While heroin use among young people remains quite low, use among teens rose significantly in eight, tenth, and twelfth grades during the 1990s. In every grade, 2.1 percent of students have tried heroin…The 1997 MTF survey found that the proportion of students reporting use of powder cocaine in the past year to be 2.2 percent, 4.1 percent, and 5 percent in grades eight, ten, and twelve respectively…Inhalant use is most common in the eighth grade where 5.6 percent used it on a past-month basis and 11.8 percent did so on a past-year basis…Current use of stimulants increased among twelfth graders from 4.1 to 4.8 percent…In 1997, the MTF found that 15 percent of eighth, 25 percent of tenth, and 31 percent of twelfth graders reported binge drinking…The 1996 NHSDA found past-month alcohol use among 18.8 percent of twelve to seventeen year olds.
These statistics are not as relevant as the examples you all ...