College students smoke and drink less than in 2010. Drunkenness is rarer and later in this population. The use of cannabis is not going back.
- 80% of 3rd year students have already experimented with alcohol.
- 45% of them have also tested electronic cigarettes. The majority experiment with tobacco at the same time.
- The proportion of adolescents who experience smoking is multiplied by 5 between the 6th and the 3rd. For cannabis, it is multiplied by 16.
Young, but not all carefree. Fewer college students experimented with alcohol and tobacco than in 2010. The French Observatory for Drugs and Drug Addiction (OFDT) publishes the results of the international survey on healthy behavior in school-aged children (HSBC). Conducted every four years with 11, 13 and 15-year-old college students, it reveals a rather positive trend for the 2014 component.
Alcohol generalized in 3e
The findings of the survey, published in the review Trendsof the OFDT, relate to 10,434 French pupils, educated in the public and the private sector. These young people were questioned about their consumption of psychoactive substances (alcohol, tobacco, cannabis) but also of shisha and e-cigarettes.
The college remains a period of initiation into alcohol, tobacco and cannabis. In 6e, one in two adolescents has already tested the first substance. In 3e, they are 80%. Drunkenness, on the other hand, is later and less frequent compared to the 2010 survey.
A sharp increase at the end of college
In general, experiments explode between the first and the last year of college. In the case of cigarettes, the proportion of teenagers concerned is multiplied by 5. The trend is even more marked for cannabis: 16 times more young people admit to having tested it at the end of their course.
The OFDT delivers the same observation by examining the frequent uses of these substances, that is to say at least once in the month preceding the survey. Drunkenness, cannabis or tobacco use double between the ages of 11 and 15. Only alcohol consumption – already high in 6e (23%) – follows a less marked curve.
A context of protection
“The levels measured by the 2014 survey are generally lower or stable compared to those of 2010”, notes the OFDT. The drop is particularly marked for alcohol. A change mainly due to young girls, who let themselves be less tempted than their male comrades. Fans of the smoke, on the other hand, are still numerous.
In the eyes of OFDT experts, “the stability, or even the decline, of various indicators for alcohol and tobacco have been seen in a context of strengthening measures to protect the youngest for ten years”. It will now be necessary to determine whether this impact continues until the end of adolescence.
E-cigarette and shisha often tested
For the first time, the HSBC survey looked at non-traditional tobacco uses: shisha and e-cigarettes. Among college students, these two products are not uncommon. More than a third of 15-year-olds have already tried hookah. But overall, this mode of consumption is considered “additional” to smoking.
The electronic cigarette is a little more widespread: 45% of students of 3e have experienced it. A majority of them have also tried tobacco “confirming the intricacy of these two modes of use in adolescence,” reports the OFDT. However, the proportion of experimenters who have never smoked tobacco is relatively high (9.0%), suggesting that teenagers’ motivations for use are partly different from those of adults. “
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