10% in Survey of Students Use Pot at Least Weekly

A survey of San Diego County public school students in the 7th, 10th and 12th grades revealed that almost 10% of them smoke marijuana daily or weekly, the county’s Drug Services Bureau announced Tuesday.

The wide-ranging survey on drug and alcohol use was conducted by the County Office of Education. Eighteen percent of the 7th-, 10th- and 12th-graders responding in the survey also said they drink alcohol daily or weekly.

The figures generally are consistent with those produced in recent national surveys, said Drug Services Bureau spokesman Melinda Newman.

“I don’t think the numbers will galvanize people into action,” Newman said, but she added that the comments included in separate surveys of county parents and school officials would help improve drug programs for adolescents.

“People have said to me, ‘only 10% are using marijuna weekly, so what,’ ” she said. “Ten percent is significant. If you project that on the (entire) school system, you’re talking about a lot of kids.”

The four-page surveys were filled out by 5,247 students throughout the county in May and included fourth-graders as well as the other three grades. None of the fourth-graders surveyed said they used drugs regularly, but 8% said they had tried marijuana once or twice. Less than 5% of respondents in all grades admitted regular use of cocaine, LSD, stimulants, depressants or snuff.

Most students who had used drugs seemed to have first experimented with them sometime between the fifth and eighth grades. The survey report said that 26% of older students who started using marijuana in the fourth grade or earlier now use it almost daily.

Newman said that although she thought the students’ answers to the questionnaires were credible, many of the heaviest drug users may have been left out of the survey because they were absent from school.

The questionnaires also asked how schools should deal with drugs, alcohol and cigarettes. Sixty-one percent of students in the 7th, 10th and 12th grades said penalties for illegal drug use should be stricter, and pluralities endorsed stricter penalties for use of alcohol and tobacco. Almost half of the students approved of undercover police working to combat drug use in schools.

In a separate survey, parents and school officials also endorsed stricter penalties and the use of undercover police in the schools.