Illicit Drug Use Falls to 47.9% for Young Adults : Narcotics: It’s the lowest rate since 1975. High school seniors are shunning cocaine and crack, survey finds.

Illegal drug use among high school seniors dropped below 50% last year for the first time since the government began conducting annual surveys, while cocaine and crack use declined significantly, federal health officials said Thursday.

“These numbers document millions of individual decisions to reject the peer pressure and false claims made by the drug culture,” Health and Human Services Secretary Louis W. Sullivan said at a press conference. “We are making substantial progress.”

The latest annual survey found that 47.9% of high school seniors acknowledged having used an illicit drug at least once in their lives, continuing a string of declines that began after illegal use reached a peak of 66% in 1982.

“This is a significant milestone,” Sullivan said, adding that the survey indicates students are beginning to believe that “drugs are not a rite of passage, but a road to disaster.”

The percentage of seniors reporting use of cocaine within the last year fell from 6.5% in 1989 to 5.3% in 1990, the lowest level since federal officials began keeping track in 1975.

“Current” use of cocaine, meaning those students who reported using the drug at least once in the 30 days before the survey, decreased from 2.8% in 1989 to 1.9% last year. Daily use of cocaine fell from 0.3% to 0.1%.

Current use of crack, a highly addictive, smokeable form of cocaine, declined dramatically, falling from 1.4% in 1989 to only 0.7% last year. Those who reported using crack at least once during the year dropped from 3.1% in 1989 to 1.9% in 1990.

Drug abuse experts applauded the findings, although they cautioned that the results do not reflect trends among high school dropouts, often the heaviest users of illegal drugs.

“I don’t think anyone doubts that among this most promising group of American youth, our anti-drug campaign over the last few years has had some impact,” said Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control.

“However, if you take into account the high school dropout problem and talk to health care professionals, hospital administrators, local police officials, drug treatment experts and court and correctional authorities, they do not report seeing a lessening of the drug crisis in the country,” Rangel said.

Chris Policano, a spokesman for Phoenix House, the nation’s largest drug abuse treatment program, agreed that the survey findings do not address the full spectrum of drug use by American youth.

“It’s obvious that many young Americans, many in the middle class, are moving away from drugs and rejecting casual drug use,” he said. “But the survey doesn’t reflect what’s happening in New York and Los Angeles, where dropout rates are so high . . . . Unfortunately, the adolescents most at risk are those who have dropped out of school. As a result, it doesn’t reflect the magnitude of the problem we still face.”

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, said that he is encouraged by the survey results but noted that “hard-core drug use remains an intractable, worsening problem.”

Federal health officials acknowledged that the findings address trends only among high school students but they noted that the surveyed group is a potential source of a large number of future drug users.

High school seniors “tend to be closer to the beginning of the drug use pipeline than to its end; that is to say, they have either never used drugs or their drug use is relatively new, experimental and casual,” said John P. Walters, acting director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

“It is from this latter category of youthful drug users that future addicts come and it is youthful drug users who usually encourage and inspire new drug use by their friends and acquaintances,” Walters said. Dr. James O. Mason, assistant secretary of health and human services, said in a statement that other studies have shown that drug use among high school dropouts “is clearly higher” than among those still in school. He said that future surveys will question students in the 8th and 10th grades to “give us a picture of drug abuse behavior at a point before most dropouts occur.”

The latest survey showed that marijuana use also decreased last year, but it remains the most widely used illicit drug among high school seniors. In addition, daily and “binge” drinking of alcohol remained constant, as did cigarette smoking.

“The survey shows that . . . for any drug to enjoy widespread use, there must be a public perception of safety--and that perception has been shattered for crack and cocaine,” said Lee Dogoloff, executive director of the American Council for Drug Education. “But what is most disconcerting is that we have not made any significant dent in either alcohol or tobacco. And that is what is likely to take our children from us before they reach maturity.”

The survey, which has been conducted for the last 16 years, sampled the experiences of 16,000 students last year from 137 public and private high schools across the country. It was conducted by the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research and funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.