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CASA Report: Children Who Take Up Drugs, Alcohol, Cigarettes Are Younger than Ever he age that children are beginning to smoke cigarettes daily, drink alcohol, and use marijuana and other illegal drugs, including cocaine and hallucinogens like LSD, is the youngest ever, according to a report released recently by the Commission on Substance Abuse Among America's Adolescents, established two years ago by Columbia's National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA).
In releasing the report, the Commission Chairman, Rev. Edward A. Malloy, president of University of Notre Dame, and Joseph A. Califano Jr., former HEW Secretary and CASA President, noted the grave threat this poses to our children during their most critical formative years. They underscored the Commission's finding that parents and families are key to winning the struggle against substance abuse and its recommendation that the nation commit at least $1 billion a year to research on addiction, and greatly step up biomedical and social research on adolescence. In its report, the Commission gave a frightening signal of illegal drug use among America's younger teenagers by releasing a finding from CASA's third annual national survey of teens and their parents. The survey of 1,115 teens (ages 12-17) found that the percentage of 12-year-olds who know a friend or classmate who has used illegal drugs like acid, cocaine or heroin jumped by 122 percent from 1996 to 1997. In 1997, 23.5 percent of 12-year-olds knew of a friend or classmate who used such hard drugs, while in 1996, only 10.6 percent knew a friend or classmate who used them. For all teens ages 12 to 17, there was an increase of 44 percent, from 39 percent in 1996 to 56 percent in 1997. The report stressed that alcohol remains the drug of choice among teenagers, the one they use and abuse most frequently, and the drug most associated with risky behaviors such as drunk driving, teen pregnancy, suicide and violence.
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