2024-01-26 09:38:23
In a bar in Toulouse, September 13, 2023. CHARLY TRIBALLEAU / AFP
When do you start drinking and smoking? When do we first experiment with psychotropic substances? And, after the “test”, how many adolescents continue to use it? To these questions, the figures revealed by the French Observatory of Drugs and Addictive Tendencies (OFDT), Thursday January 25, provide a message “overall encouraging”in the words of its director, Guillaume Airagnes: the age of initiations – of “first times” – declines, even though these experiments always begin during the first years of college. And consumption levels continue to decline.
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These are two of the main lessons from the national survey in middle and high schools among adolescents on health and substances, known as EnClass, conducted by the OFDT and the School of Advanced Studies in Public Health (EHESP) with the assistance of of national education. Some 9,566 middle and high school students participated, by answering an online questionnaire in class, between March and June 2022. This is the second survey of its kind (the first as comprehensive dating back to 2018). Backed by other national and international investigations, EnClass makes it possible to compare the levels of experimentation and dissemination of psychoactive substances.
In detail, as for college students, 43.4% say they have tried alcohol in 2022 compared to 60% in 2018. 11.4% have tried cigarettes in 2022, compared to 21.2% four years ago. earlier. The figures are lower for cannabis, but the trend is no different: 5.3% of students in 4th and 3rd grade classes have tested this substance, compared to 6.7% in 2018.
Downward trend
Statistical photography evolves with the school level, particularly during the transition from middle school to high school. Concerning tobacco, experimentation, estimated at 4.6% in 6th grade, then 18.8% in 3rd grade, increases to 30% in 2nd grade. For cannabis, 16.3% of 2nd grade students say they have used it; Nearly one in three declare it in their final year (31.2%). This also applies to the uses ” in the month “ or “regular” which, when moving from 3rd to 2nd, experience an increase.
Nevertheless, and this is the message insisted on Thursday, when presenting the survey, its two coordinators, Stanislas Spilka, head of the statistical unit of the OFDT, and Emmanuelle Godeau, teacher-researcher at EHESP: overall levels of use of psychoactive substances are down in 2022 compared to 2018. A trend that can be traced over a longer period, since 2010, and which has increased with the Covid-19 health crisis, from 2020.
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