COLUMBUS – Finally, some good news on the drug front: A national report shows decreasing use by high schoolers of alcohol, prescription painkillers and synthetic marijuana.
READ MORE: In The Columbus Dispatch
However, 12th-graders now are smoking more marijuana than tobacco, and many say they feel it poses little or no health hazard, according to the 2015 Monitoring the Future annual survey released on Wednesday by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
The survey, funded through the National Institutes of Health, gauges drug use and drug attitudes nationally by students in the eighth, 10th and 12th grades.
Researchers at the University of Michigan have been doing the survey work since 1975. A total of 44,892 students in 382 schools, public and private, across the country participated in the survey.
The results showed use of prescription narcotics was
4.4 percent among high-school students, less than half of the 10.5 percent rate in the 2003 study.
On the flip side, the study found that while marijuana use remained about the same as 2014, more high-school seniors are smoking marijuana daily (6 percent) than tobacco (5.5 percent). A decreasing number of students think marijuana poses a health problem.