Cocaine use five times higher in Irish teens

FIVE TIMES as many Irish teenagers have used cocaine as their European teenage counterparts, a new study indicates.

Research presented by Dr Deirdre Palmer of the UCD School of psychology at a conference in Dublin yesterday on drug and alcohol misuse among young people also found twice as many Irish teenagers had tried drugs compared with their European peers.

In her study of 462 15- to 19-year-olds in the southeast, 49.7 per cent of the teenagers said they had used drugs at some stage, compared with 22 per cent of teenagers in the most recent European Survey on Alcohol and Drugs survey.

Dr Palmer sourced the young people through schools and conducted the research herself, guaranteeing the young people's confidentiality.

She said she was confident of the reliability of the results as she had made up a "dummy-drug" name, and none of the respondents reported having used it.

Some 41 per cent of the teenagers had used cannabis, compared with 21 per cent of their European peers, while 11 per cent had used cocaine, compared with 2 per cent in Europe.

Dr Palmer said there was "no significant difference" between boys and girls in terms of their drug and alcohol use. The average age of first drug use was 14 for both boys and girls.

Some 86 per cent had drunk alcohol and again there was no difference between boys and girls in terms of the age they had their first drink, which averaged 13.

Girls, however, were more likely to drink regularly. At the younger age of 15 years, 20 per cent of girls said they drank once a week compared with 12 per cent of boys. At 19 years, 67 per cent of young women drank once a week, while 50 per cent of young men drank as regularly.

The young people reported that on a typical drinking session they drank 5.75 drinks - males averaging 6.25 drinks per session and females 5.35. The amount increased with age, with 4.14 drinks being the average at 15 years and 7.36 being the average per session consumed at 19 years.

Females were more likely to report alcohol had caused problems at home, while males said alcohol had led to physical fights, damage to property or trouble with the police.

Also at the conference, the director of one of the country's biggest youth counselling services said there was a growing tolerance of students' alcohol abuse by schools.

Mary Forrest, director of Crosscare Teen Counselling, said she believed hangovers were almost "accepted as normal" by teachers.

Speaking to The Irish Times at the conference, she said the threshold had "seriously dropped in schools for identifying alcohol problems".

"There is a general lack - not just in the schools - of identifying young people misusing alcohol. We used to get a lot of referrals from schools of young people misusing alcohol and we don't anymore. Something is happening and I suspect it's that alcohol-related issues have become routine."

Marion Rackard, director of Alcohol Action Ireland, also said there was a problem of young people with alcohol-related issues not being identified. "Kids are unable to identify themselves as alcohol or substance misusers.

"There's the 'don't trust, don't talk, don't feel' thing with kids. And services are very, very short on the ground even when they are identified. When you consider that alcohol is almost always the gateway drug for all other drug misuse, identifying alcohol misusing young people is crucial."

Asked whether alcohol abuse was really worse among young people today than it was 20 years ago, she said it was. The conference, Alcohol and Drug Use in Young People: A World of Solutions was hosted by Juvenile Mental Health Matters and the UCD school of psychology in UCD.