Teen drug use drops, but there's still a lot of it

But substance experts see warnings woven in with the positive data. One troubling sign comes from several numbers found among eighth-graders surveyed by the Monitoring the Future Study by the University of Michigan.

It found that while the other grades continued to find drops in overall drug use, a number of drugs leveled off in the junior high crowd. That's usually a harbinger of what's to come in future surveys of higher grades. Also, abuse of alcohol - still the drug which does the most harm to teens - remained essentially the same across the grade levels. The abuse of prescription painkillers like OxyContin actually went up in the eighth, 10th, and 12th grades, with 4.5 percent of 12th graders reporting using the drug without a doctor's prescription in the past year.

"Considering the addictive potential of this drug, these are disturbingly high rates of use," said Lloyd Johnston, principal investigator of the Monitoring the Future Study, "and they contrast with heroin's annual prevalence rate of less than 1 percent on all three grade levels."

The other less tangible but more worrisome reason to worry about the future has to do with American culture. Historically, drug use in the United States is cyclical, but that's often ignored in the wake of good news. When drug use goes down, some of the urgency and funding that fueled prevention programs like the Partnership's aggressive ad campaigns also dissipates.

"Drug abuse lends itself to public denial so when there's good news people are predisposed to think they don't have to deal with it any more," says Dr. Peter Provet, president of Odyssey House, a substance abuse and mental-health treatment agency based in New York. "[The problem] remains severe."

Indeed, as Dr. Provet reads the data, almost half of all teens admit to trying illegal drugs. And 24 percent, that's almost 1 in 4, admit to using illegal drugs within the past month. And then there are the kids who've dropped out of the larger culture overall - the hard-core drug teens who aren't registered in the data because they're dropouts and homeless.

"If we talk about the hard-core teen addicts, I've seen no decrease, only an increase in the past year," says Dr. Provet. "Odyssey House had 1,000 treatment beds and they're filled."

Join Together's Dr. Rosenbloom also worries that the data reflect only reductions in casual use and may mask a more difficult social problem. One in 5 American kids lives in a household where an adult has an untreated alcohol or drug problem.

"Those kids are at particular risk," says Rosenbloom. "We need to get them educated and their parents into treatment to prevent the cycle from continuing. "

• Kimberly Chase contributed to this report.

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