Marijuana use 'mainstream' among teens
By: Janice Tibbetts - CanWest News Service, Victoria Times-Colonist, 10/29/03

OTTAWA -- Marijuana is making a dramatic comeback among teens.

A national survey of 1,250 12-to-19 year olds revealed that getting high is once again "mainstream," says a Health Canada representative.

The results suggest the greatest pot use among young people in 25 years.

Health Canada gave a preliminary report of its findings last week to a House of Commons committee holding hearing on a bill that would decriminalize marijuana but stiffen penalties against grow operations.

"Research we have conducted on 12-to-19 year olds shows us that marijuana has gone mainstream and is well integrated into teen lifestyle," reported Linda Dabros, a special adviser to Health Canada's director general of drug strategy.

Fifty-four per cent of 15-to-19 year olds said they had smoked up more than once. When 12-to-14 year olds were added to the mix, however, the overall numbers dropped to 34 per cent.

Cigarette smoking, on the other hand, continues to decline among young people, with the latest national figures showing that 22 per cent of teens light up regularly.

Teen marijuana smokers appear to be imitating their baby-boom parents, said Richard Garlick, a spokesman for the Canadian Centre for Substance Abuse. "Youth rates are going up and are at levels that we haven't seen since the late '70s when rates reached their peak," said Garlick.

"Some people say it's an attitudinal thing, that kids who have been getting into cannabis use recently are children of the baby boom and the notion there is that baby boomers don't have the same kind of alarmist views that their parents might have had," he said.

Other possible explanations, Garlick said, are that the supply has steadily increased and, at the same time, the federal government put its fight against drugs on a back burner.

"We went to sleep on the issue and cannabis rates started coming up again."

The telephone survey was conducted in August, with four-to-five followup discussions online with participants.

Dabros said that teens appear to be confused about the state of the federal pot law. It is a criminal offence to smoke marijuana, but the federal Liberals have proposed legislation to decriminalize possession of less than 15 grams so that people would be fined rather than criminally charged.

The survey is one of the first that the federal government has done in a decade to measure the extent of Canada's drug problem. The Health Department intends to use the data for an anti-marijuana campaign that is being developed to prevent teens smoking their first joint.

The last national survey involving young people and drugs, done in 1994, showed that one-third of 15-to-24 year olds had tried marijuana.

Health Department spokeswoman Catherine Saunders said the government, in the latest survey, questioned teens about how often they smoke drugs, but those figures are still to be analyzed.

Bill Baker, president of the Ontario School Counsellors Association, said he suspects that only a small minority of teens smoke marijuana regularly and that it is not "just flaunted everywhere" in schools.

"I think it's very dependent on the school and the clientele at the school," said Baker.

At his small high school in southern Ontario, for instance, police drug dogs do periodic checks but have failed to find anything, he said