Young people and drugs.

Young people and Drugs

* Spiky-haired teenagers sniffing glue beside a railway track;

* Students injecting heroin at a local "shooting gallery";

* Youths buying marijuana outside a schoolyard;

* Young people in a country village smoking coca-paste.

Say the word "drugs", and most of us would probably come up with an image such as these--a scenario that inevitably involves young people.

The current concern over youth's experimentation with illegal drugs is understandable, but researchers say there may be an even greater problem. Although illegal drugs can be very dangerous, such common "legal" drugs as tobacco and alcohol also have far-reaching health consequences. A 1980 Australian survey which estimated that drugs were responsible for nearly 19 per cent of all deaths found that 79 per cent of drug-related deaths were caused by tobacco, 18 per cent by alcohol and only 3 per cent by all other drugs put together, including prescribed medications.

The problems of drinking and smoking arouse less concern than illegal drug use because those substances are so widely used by adults in many societies. Yet smoking is one of the greatest health hazards today and a major cause of avoidable death.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), "the earlier a person begins to smoke, the greater the risk of developing lung cancer, as well as other life-threatening diseases". Someone who starts smoking before age 14 is fifteen times more likely to develop lung cancer than a non-smoker, while someone who begins at 24 is three times more likely. There is also a greater risk of heart disease, emphysema and chronic bronchitis for those who start smoking in their teens.

In the developed countries, smoking is still a widespread problem--43 per cent of French teenagers smoke, for example, and 38 per cent of Canadian youths. But it is in the developing countries that the problem is growing fastest. The amount of tobacco consumption between 1976 and 1980 increased by 5 per cent in Indonesia, 3 per cent in Brazil and 6 per cent in Turkey, while it declined in some industrialised countries. In France, it actually dropped by 7 per cent and in the United States, by 2 per cent.

Young people's...