Student Drug Use Report Withheld

The withdrawal of a report said to show alarming patterns of drug use among adolescents has been condemned by anti-drug campaigners as politically motivated.

The report was the second this week to have its release cancelled.  On Wednesday a drug users' advocacy group abruptly cancelled the release of a needle exchange report that contradicted State Government policy.  The report into adolescent drug use uses data from the 1996 Australian School Students' Alcohol and Drugs Survey, which interviewed 5,000 high school students aged 12 to 17 from 143 NSW schools.

Sources close to the survey said it revealed rapidly escalating rates of drug use among teenagers outside Sydney, where rates used to be low, and very high use of heroin and cocaine in Sydney hotspots.

There is also said to be evidence of an epidemic of anabolic steroid abuse, and an increase in marijuana, alcohol and tobacco use.

The long-awaited report was to be released next Monday.  When the event was called off yesterday, health professionals had been invited but not the media.  A spokeswoman for the NSW Cancer Council, which prepared the report for the Department of Health, blamed the delay on "printing difficulties". But a less controversial companion survey the same data - on students' physical activity and sun protection practices - was unaffected by the problem, she said.  She could not say when the launch might be rescheduled. The raw data was received in 1997.  The Herald sought comment from the office of the Minister for Health, Dr Refshauge, but was referred to his department, where a spokesman said most of the survey's results had been released in a September summary.  It revealed that a third of those surveyed indulged in regular binge drinking and 30 to 40 per cent had tried cannabis.

But the executive director of the Network of Alcohol and other Drug Agencies, Mr Peter Connie, called the summary "very inappropriate", adding: "It was a very selective assimilation of some of the data."

It provided no comparative data over time which would have shown how teenage drug taking had increased, Mr Connie said, and it did not present regional differences.

"There's an election on March 27," he said.  "I would strongly suspect that that information would not be published in any full sense by that time."

The National Drug and Alcohol Research Council's information manager, Mr Paul Dillon, said it was morally wrong for the figures to be withheld, because old information was ineffective in youth education campaigns. "Trends in drug use change so quickly we should have those results almost instantly," he said.

The chief executive officer of Action on Smoking and Health, Ms Anne Jones, said there should be no political interference in public health data.

"The Cancer Council's in a difficult position of having to do this jointly with [the Department of] Health.  I find it very odd it's taken so long, and I hope the fact that there's an election in March has not deterred [the Government] in any way from releasing the information."

Ms Jones produced figures, from peak health bodies, showing NSW spent 10c a person on anti-smoking campaigns in 1996, down from 34c in 1995 and a fraction of the national average of 50c.

But without the figures for teenagers, it was impossible to gauge the effect of the Carr Government's apparent lack of commitment to anti-smoking campaigns.