Irish students drink more, get drunk more and smoke more than the typical European student, a comprehensive new survey shows. They also take more illegal drugs, including cannabis, than the average European student, according to the study, which is the first of its kind across Europe.
The European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs, which has been seen by The Irish Times, was carried out among 50,000 16-year-old students in 26 countries. It follows a report earlier this week by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction in Portugal which also highlighted the extent of drug use among Irish teenagers and used figures supplied from the school survey report. Two-thirds (66 per cent) of Irish students in that survey said they had been drunk in the last 12 months, compared to an average of 48 per cent among students from the 26 countries.
Seventy per cent of students in the UK said they had been drunk in the last 12 months.
Two out of five (41 per cent) of Irish students said they had smoked in the last month, the second-highest figure from all the countries surveyed and 9 percentage points above the average. Almost two out of five (37 per cent) of Irish students said they had used cannabis, compared to a European average of 12 per cent. Sixteen per cent said they had used other illicit drugs, compared to an average of 4 per cent. The figure on cannabis use among students was included in this week's monitoring centre report.
The countries in the school survey report were Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, the Faroe Islands, Finland, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine and the UK. France, Germany and the Netherlands were not included in the survey for financial and administrative reasons.
The school survey research in Ireland was funded by the Department of Health and carried out by Dr Mark Morgan, a psychologist at St Patrick's College, Dublin. He surveyed almost 1,900 16year-old students from 80 schools in 1995.
He said the findings were of concern. "While a lot of people have given a good deal of attention to illegal drugs, it remains the case that the main problem in Europe is legal drugs like cigarettes and alcohol, and this is especially the case among teenagers in Ireland." The study was co-ordinated by the Swedish Council for Information on Alcohol and Other Drugs and partly funded by the Council of Europe. EU report focuses on need for unified approach to drug abuse: page 10