Ecstasy usage increasing among teenagers - Drug Abuse - Brief Article - Statistical Data Included

Use of the drug ecstasy continued to rise among American teenagers in 2001, following sharp increases among young adults and adolescents in recent years, but the rate of growth finally is beginning to slow. That result comes from the national survey in the Monitoring the Future series, conducted annually for the past 27 years by the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, Ann Arbor, which included about 44,000 students in 424 public and private secondary schools.

Ecstasy, also known as MDMA (methylenedioxymethamphetamine), is a stimulant drug, often taken for its hallucinogenic effects. It first became popular in the "rave" and all-night party scene, and its use spread and began to increase sharply in 1999. The proportions of eighth-, 10th-, and 12th-graders who reported having ever taken ecstasy in 2001 were five, eight, and 12%, respectively.

"In the past, we have seen a turnaround in use occur for other drugs as a result of more young people seeing them as dangerous," study director Lloyd D. Johnson observes. "We have been saying for some time that the use of this drug will not turn around until young people begin to see its use as risky, and this year, for the first time, they are finally beginning to see it as more dangerous." The proportion of 12th-graders (the only ones asked about their perceptions of risk for this drug) saying that there is a great risk associated with experimenting with ecstasy jumped from 38% in 2000 to 46% in 2001. "I believe this is happening as a result of accumulating evidence about ecstasy's adverse consequences, vigorous efforts by the National Institute on Drug Abuse to disseminate the facts about possible consequences, and extensive media coverage of the drug and its effects."

At the same time, however, there is a continuing sharp increase in the availability of ecstasy, with the proportion of 12th-graders saying that they could get it "fairly" to "very" easily rising from 51% in 2000 to 62% in 2001. "This reflects an extremely rapid spread in availability," he points out, "which is due in part to the fact that this drug is still reaching new communities." In 1998, 53% of the schools in the 12th-grade national sample had any survey respondent who had used ecstasy, but this proportion rose to 66% by 2000, and reached 72% by 2001. "Thus, even if fewer students are willing to use ecstasy in the schools where it has been present, that decline very likely has been more than offset by the continuing rapid diffusion of the drug to additional areas," Johnson says.

The use of ecstasy has reached many demographic subgroups, but it is much-less favored among African-American students than among whites and Hispanics. Among 12th-graders, only two percent of African-American students report using ecstasy in the prior year, compared to 10% of both white and Hispanic students.

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