Disappearing Drug Users

Last week's NORML newsletter notes a study reported in the February issue of the journal Addiction that found young adolescents who receive "drug education" are more likely than their peers to deny drug use a year after reporting it. In the study, which involved about 3,300 students in Northern Ireland who filled out a drug use questionnaire in 2000 and again in 2001, 17 percent of drug use reports were recanted.

Recanting rates seemed to increase with the social stigma attached to the drug: The rates were 7 percent, 10 percent, and 17 percent, respectively, for alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana, compared to 82 percent for cocaine and 85 percent for heroin. A commentary in the same issue of Addiction suggests that, given the young age of the students (12.5 on average in the second survey), much of the recanting likely was due to fictitious reports the kids later thought better of or forgot about, as opposed to reports of actual drug use they later decided to deny.

Either way, the researchers note, "The possibility of drugs education biasing drug use reporting, via increased recanting independent of actual behaviour change, may have substantive implications for the evaluation of drugs education itself. It could be argued that evaluation studies showing a positive effect for drugs education (i.e. a decline in reported drug use in an intervention group relative to a control group) may in fact be reporting differences in the willingness of young people to give truthful answers to the drug use questions rather than changes in willingness to use illicit substances."