Survey Finds White Students More Apt to Abuse Drugs

A drug-use survey of students nationwide found that white high school seniors are more apt to abuse drugs than black seniors, according to figures released Monday.

“It goes against conventional wisdom--particularly television has portrayed the problem of drug abuse in the United States as a black, inner-city problem,” said Doug Hall, vice president of the national Parents’ Resource Institute for Drug Education Inc.

Atlanta-based PRIDE surveyed 296,180 white students and 59,898 black students in grades 6-12 at 958 schools in 38 states during the 1988-89 school year, including students in inner city areas in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, New York and Washington, D.C.

“The key is keeping teen-agers in school,” PRIDE co-founder Marsha Keith Schuchard said in a statement. “Black students who stay in school have significantly fewer drug and alcohol problems.”

The focus on inner-city drug use by blacks “feeds the increasing expressions of racism that surface daily in our country,” she said at a news conference announcing the survey results.

“The preoccupation with blacks and crack also misleads white parents into underestimating the temptations and dangers their teens face from the multibillion-dollar drug culture.”

Judge Reggie Walton, associate director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, called drugs an American problem.

“For all too long, this problem has been portrayed as a black problem, and I think the end result has been that there are some people who have not really cared a lot about it because of that,” he said. “This is an American problem, not just a black problem.”

The survey found that “black students find cocaine about twice as available as white students, but they use cocaine less than white students, by a substantial amount,” Hall said.

About 15% of black students overall said cocaine was easy to get, compared with 8% of white students who responded that way, he said, noting that cocaine referred to both the powder and its smokable derivative, crack.

However, in the 12th grade, in which some 40,000 students were surveyed, only 4% of the black students said they had used cocaine at least once in the previous year, while 7% of white students said they had done so.