East Lyme ― Recent survey results indicate that students who drank alcohol recently said they did so to be social or to feel good, while those who used marijuana generally cited a different reason: they did it to cope.
That’s according to Southeast Connecticut Regional Action, the substance abuse prevention group that in April administered an anonymous online survey to students in grades seven through 12. Last month, the group released the results with around 80% of the student population participating.
Of the 1,111 middle and high school students surveyed, just over 5% said they had used alcohol and just under 5% said they had used marijuana in the past 30 days.
While the number of college students reporting recent alcohol and marijuana use was similar, SERAC epidemiologist Jennika Jenkins said it’s concerning that college students generally report using marijuana for reasons adaptation.
She said using a substance as a coping mechanism comes with an increased risk of addiction.
“The fact that coping came up as a major reason for using marijuana is…something I would definitely pay attention to,” she told school board members during a presentation in November.
SERAC acting executive director Angela Rae Duhaime said this week that teenagers are more likely to become addicted because of how their brains work. And students with depression and anxiety may be at greater risk of using drugs or alcohol to cope with stress-related issues.
“Research from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism shows that people who started drinking before the age of 15 were 50% more likely to become dependent on alcohol at adulthood,” she said.
She pointed to an explanation of the link between mental health disorders and addiction from the non-profit Child Mind Institute, a group dedicated to mental health and learning disabilities in children.
“In the adolescent brain, pathways between regions are still developing. This is why teenagers quickly learn new things. This ‘plasticity’ means the brain easily habituates to drugs and alcohol,” the organization wrote.
The group said that drug and alcohol use progresses from experimentation to a serious disorder much faster in adolescents than in adults, and that the progression is more likely to occur in children with developmental disorders. Mental Health.
The survey results showed that 9.7% of college students said they had used marijuana at some point in their life.
Surveys use the last 30 days as a standard indicator of current usage, while the “lifetime” metric indicates experimental usage.
With regard to alcohol, 16.6% of students surveyed said they had consumed alcohol at some point in their lives.
Jenkins acknowledged that student responses might not fully reflect the reality of addiction and mental health issues in the city.
“With any type of self-report, there will be a gap between actual behavior,” she said. “It’s probably underreported.”
The figures are down sharply from 2015, when a survey of 1,200 students found that 14% said they had consumed alcohol in the past 30 days, while 33% said have consumed alcohol in their lifetime. When it comes to marijuana, 9% of students said they had used it recently and 18% said they had used it in their lifetime.
For more than a decade, SERAC has been investigating high school students throughout Southeast Connecticut. Duhaime said surveys have been carried out more recently in towns such as Colchester, Griswold, Lyme-Old Lyme and Norwich.
The survey was sponsored by the school and endorsed by the East Lyme Prevention Council.
School board member Jaime Barr Shelburn has expressed his own concerns about any trends that indicate students may be more likely to become addicted to marijuana.
Shelburn said she wants East Lyme to ban marijuana sales in towns like Waterford recently did. The East Lyme Zoning Commission this spring approved a special permit allowing a local businesswoman to sell marijuana for medical and recreational purposes to adults, though the plan has not yet been approved by the state.
“I think with legalization and so many parents and adults saying they can use it, we’re going to see that number go up — if they’re telling the truth,” Shelburn said.
Survey results showed that only 31% of college students ranked marijuana use as a high risk, compared to 45.2% who said it was a high risk to drink one to two drinks a day.
The survey results delved into the area of mental health to reveal that 20.7% of students said they had thought about harming themselves and 8.3% had seriously considered suicide.
School board member Bill Derry said that translates to too many students when one is too many.
“Two hundred children are thinking of harming themselves and 83 children have seriously considered suicide,” he said. “That scares me.”
e.regan@theday.com
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