Thousands of 16-year-old students will be singing along in their bedrooms and in bars this weekend to a song called The Drugs Don't Work by the best-selling British band, The Verve. While mouthing the lyrics of this song (which is not an anti-drugs anthem) these teenagers will be drinking more, smoking more and taking more illegal drugs than the typical European student.
Two major European surveys produced this week show that for Irish students drugs, both legal and illegal, clearly are working.
More worrying perhaps is the evidence that warnings from the Government about the health effects of alcohol, cigarettes and illegal drugs, as well as efforts to restrict teenagers' access to them, are not working.
The European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs (ESPAD) revealed that Irish 16-year-old students are top of the class of 26 European coun tries in terms of binge drinking.
They rank second, after students in the UK, when it comes to taking cannabis or any other illegal drugs and second, after their counterparts in the Faroe Islands, when it comes to smoking.
The report from the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) in Portugal shows Ireland has the youngest drugs addicts in Europe, with an average age of 23.
The Minister for Health and Children, Mr Cowen, and the Minister of State with responsibility for the National Drugs Strategy Team, Mr Chris Flood, will take part in debates on many of these findings in the Dail next Wednesday and Thursday.
While the statistics may worry parents and agitate the Opposition, they come as little surprise to professionals working with young people, said Mr Eamonn Waters from the National Youth Council of Ireland. "We have reached a crisis stage. The thing that amazes me most is that people are surprised by these figures because anybody who is working on the ground has seen this coming for years," he said.
"If these figures related to any other area, like diseases or car accidents, there would be a national outcry, but in this case there seems to be a lot of complacency . . . Legal drugs seem not be taken as seriously, but the problem is getting worse and worse."
The ESPAD report shows that the problem with both legal and illegal drugs is on both the supply and demand sides. The vast majority of students said they considered it easy to get beer, wine, spirits or inhalants if they wanted them. Two-thirds said it was easy to get cannabis and half said it was easy to get ecstasy.
"What's remarkable is that Irish kids see almost everything as easy to get if they want to get it," said Dr Mark Morgan, a psychologist from St Patrick's College in Dublin who carried out the ESPAD research among 1,900 16-year-old students in 80 schools in 1995.
"What that means is that whatever measures are in place at the moment to prevent them from having access, certainly they don't see them as effective."
The report also shows that war nings about the health risks of alcohol, tobacco and illegal drugs are simply not getting across to students, 41 per cent of whom smoke regularly. Two in five students said smoking one or more packs of cigarettes a day was not a great risk.
Just under half the students said they did not think taking mariju ana regularly was a great risk and about half said they did not see occasional use of ecstasy, cocaine or inhalants as a great risk either. More than 80 per cent of the students said they did not believe taking five drinks or more once or twice each weekend was a great risk.
"These figures show a striking dissonance in that the young people would appear to have such disregard for their own health, yet they are concerned about environmental issues such as saving the whale or the rain forests," said Ms Marie Murray, principal clinical psychologist in St Joseph's Adolescent Service and co-author of The Teenage Years, a guide book for parents of teenagers.
"Is that due to some feeling of doom and gloom about the future or simply arrogance? I don't have the answer, but I think it is a question that needs to be asked and that we have to try to answer.
"It could be that at a time of great uncertainty when there isn't a specific value system to attach themselves to or a specific behavi oural code, there is a strong sense among young people of being rudderless, of them not being able to envisage a future for themselves."
When it comes to illegal drugs, the ESPAD report debunks the myth that there are shadowy figures hovering around school playgrounds or under-age discos push ing drugs on our teenagers. Only 2 per cent of students who had taken illegal drugs said they had been introduced to them by stran gers, according to the ESPAD survey. Almost two in five had re ceived their first drugs from siblings, friends or in a group.
"The idea that some people have that there are pushers hanging round schools who give kids drugs and then hope they'll get them hooked and so on isn't the case," said Dr Morgan, who is also one of the ESPAD report's six authors.
"It's very significant that the actual link isn't directly between the suppliers and the kids. It's other kids who are supplying them. For policy-makers, this shows clearly that prevention starts with friends and that you can't blame the supply of drugs for the drug problem."
Ash Ireland said the statistics showed that health-promotion messages were not having an impact on Irish students, two in five of whom smoke regularly. Democratic Left's health spokeswoman, Ms Liz McManus, said a comprehensive programme was needed to prevent drug abuse and educate young people about the dangers of alcohol misuse.
A spokeswoman for Mr Cowen said he was concerned about the drugs situation and was working closely with his Government colleagues to address it. Significant progress had been made on implementing recommendations in the two reports from the ministerial task force on measures to reduce the demand for drugs, she said.
Mr Waters said the Government was not putting enough mo ney into education programmes in both schools and non-formal arenas such as youth organisations. Comprehensive peer education was also crucial.
He called on the Government to immediately honour its commitment made last May for £20 million towards a youth service development fund to reduce the demand for drugs. A spokesman for Mr Flood said no agreement had been reached in the Cabinet on when and how to administer this funding.
"It's a question of refocusing priorities and not just looking at the judicial or legal end, but at the whole education system and demand reduction," said Mr Waters.
"You can introduce ID cards, you can lock up pushers, you can tackle more rogue publicans, but if there is still a demand, people will still supply it."