“Periods of new experiences”, the seven years of college and high school correspond to “diffusion times of different psychoactive substances”, says theEnCLASS study. This “national survey in middle and high school among adolescents on health and substances“from the French Observatory of Drugs and Drug Addiction (OFDT) examines the health and the first experiments of adolescents. First sips of alcohol, first cigarettes … Do young people drink and smoke more than their elders?
The survey, published this Tuesday, June 12, is the result of responses from more than 20,000 French people aged 11-18. They had to fill out an online questionnaire, about “their well-being, their health behaviors and their consumption of psychoactive substances”. Finally, it seems that high school students are more reasonable than four years ago.
A “disaffection” for tobacco
Experimentation with tobacco fell in particular among middle school students, dropping from 27.8% in 2014 to 21.2% in 2018. Among high school students, this decrease is all the more marked, with 8 points less in four years ( from 60.9 to 53.0%). Less than one in five high school students (17.4%) now smoke daily, testifying to a “some disaffection for the product in these younger generations”. The result, as for their parents, anti-smoking policies widely deployed by the government – price increases, neutral packages, reimbursement of nicotine substitutes or “Tobacco-free Me (s)”. The only difference being that their elders are former smokers who are trying to quit, while these teenagers do not go into smoking.
The temptation to cannabis, too, fell by 4 points in middle school (from 9.8 to 6.7%) and by 11 points in high school (from 44 to 33.1%). Its regular use remains stable, since 6.2% of those questioned consumed it at least ten times in the month last year. But in parallel, it is theuse of electronic cigarettes which is spreading. Half of high school students have already tried it, compared to a third in 2015. “The image of the Marlboro cowboy is largely outdated today. If we want to be rebellious, wouldn’t it be the e-cigarette instead?”, asks Stanislas Spilka, one of the authors of the study interviewed by AFP.
A shadow on the board: alcohol
Despite the ban on the sale of alcohol and tobacco to those under the age of 18, young people have no problem obtaining them. Thus, 44% of college students have already drunk when entering sixth grade. They will be more than 75% in third. One in two high school students has been drunk. Over the past four years, the experience of drunkenness in college has declined, while it has stagnated in high school.
“Alcohol appears to be very accessible to high school students, even if they are essentially minors”, enlightens the OFDT. In the month respondents were surveyed, more than half who drank did so in a bar (56.9%) and 4 in 10 (40.6%) bought it themselves in a store. Drinking behaviors are still predominantly male, since 33.2% of boys consume alcohol regularly (ten times a month) against half as many girls (16%).
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