"Teen drug use declining - or is it?"
http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/ ... /411140410Sunday, November 14, 2004
Teen drug use declining - or is it?
By Tim Bonfield
Enquirer staff writer
Randy and Resa Young have stood by their son Randy Paul Young, now 21, through his rough road to recovery from substance abuse.
The Enquirer/MICHAEL E. KEATING
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Randy Paul Young was creative and tenacious about smoking pot.
As a freshman at Summit Country Day, he and his friends actually fashioned Legos into a functioning marijuana pipe. "You don't see that one on the box," says his father, Randy Young.
So when this father sees statistics indicating that teen use of cigarettes, beer and marijuana have reached some of their lowest levels in 20 years, he's a bit doubtful.
"I still get a sense that drug abuse is a very real problem. If usage is going down, that would be great. But drugs still affect so many families," the elder Young says.
A new "State of the Community" report issued Friday by the United Way of Greater Cincinnati uses trend data to assess the region's social, economic and public health. The report was written to help civic and government agencies and charities like United Way decide which issues need special attention and targeted funding.
The numbers are encouraging:
? This year, less than 20 percent of local teens in grades 7-12 reported drinking beer at least once in the previous month - down from 30 percent in 2000 and the lowest level since the mid-1980s.
? Cigarette smoking is down as well. Fifteen percent of students this year reported smoking in the past month, down from 21 percent just four years ago.
? Marijuana use has decreased slightly, too. The number of students who said they smoked pot in the past month dipped from 15 percent in 2000 to 13 percent in 2002, the same level as today.
But heading in the right direction isn't the same as saying the problem is fixed.
More than one in five high school juniors and seniors still report smoking marijuana at least once a month. So do three of every 100 kids in seventh grade.
"Even if less than 4 percent of seventh-graders are using marijuana, that number is huge," Young says. "That's a lot of families going through a lot of pain."
Randy Paul's story
Randy Paul started drinking in seventh grade and smoking pot during the summer between eighth and ninth grades.
"I was blown away by how many kids were using marijuana when I started high school. All the people I wanted approval from were doing it," he says.
He got in trouble with his family, and later with police. His parents put him through counseling twice, with no effect. They considered sending him to military school.
Randy Paul would promise to quit. Sometimes he really did - for a while.
During the summer after his sophomore year, Randy Paul's father dragged his son along as he made sales calls all day.
"I was thinking, 'At least I have him. There's no way he can use,' " his father says.
But he was wrong. Randy Paul would wait until his parents fell asleep, then climb out a back window to party with his friends.
"He'd return at 4 or 5 a.m. and then sleep in the car. I had no idea what was going on. The drugs really had a hold on him," Randy Paul's father says.
Everything peaked when he got drunk and high during a festival, and then later that night got caught as the getaway driver when a friend tried to steal beer from a Kroger store.
"We were at our wits' end," Randy Paul's father says.
Finally, a friend connected the family with another parent whose child had been successfully treated through Milford-based Kids Helping Kids.
The program involves months of daylong counseling sessions plus spending nights with foster families of other teens who had gone through the process. Parents participate in counseling as well.
Randy Paul spent a year in the program, and still graduated on time from Milford High School. By completing the program, the charges he faced in the Kroger episode were dropped.
Now, he's 21 and a senior at Miami University, living clean and sober.
It helps that his roommate is a graduate of Kids Helping Kids. They socialize with a group of students who have been through the program, too.
"It absolutely turned around my life," Randy Paul says.
"Before I went in, I remember watching TV with my parents, and those commercials would come on about how parents should talk to their kids about drugs. I remember how uncomfortable and horrible that was.
"But Kids Helping Kids forced my parents and me to come to the table," Randy Paul says. "Before, I wouldn't talk to my dad about anything. Now, whenever I have a problem, the first person I think of talking to is my dad."
Many still need help
Randy Paul's story is fairly common, substance-abuse specialists say. Even if the overall number of teen drug users has been shrinking, the number of young people who need help with serious drug abuse problems has not.
"From my vantage point, it's not getting any better," says Penny Walker, executive director of Kids Helping Kids. "There are more kids who need treatment than are getting treatment."
Her statement is bolstered by a study issued this year by the Greater Cincinnati Health Foundation, which reports that as few as 5 percent of teens with substance-abuse disorders ever get treatment.
By focusing on general declines in common substances, some worry that the United Way report might create a false sense of contentment about youth drug abuse.
For example, the report doesn't address abuse of harder-core drugs such as heroin, OxyContin, methamphetamines and inhalants. And by using statistics from a school-based survey by the Coalition for a Drug-Free Greater Cincinnati, some experts fear the report could overlook some of the worst abusers.
Some teen drug abusers have dropped out of school. Some are in jail. Some have been sent to residential treatment programs, here and out-of-state.
Some are dead.
"The kids we see have serious problems. We're not seeing demand go down," says Pam McClain, vice president of Talbert House, an agency that provides a variety of addiction treatment programs.
She hopes the good news reported by United Way doesn't lead to a slacking off on prevention efforts.
"If you want to keep (drug abuse rates) down, you don't want to take money away. Otherwise, the rates will shoot back up," she says.
United Way president Rob Reifsnyder says there was no intent to overlook trends in harder drugs.
But because relatively few teens are using the hardest drugs, there wasn't enough meaningful data to include in the report.
"Part of the point of this report is to challenge the community," he says.
"We need more discussion of this and all the indicators. We need to discuss: What are the most important issues to work on?"
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