SHAM SURVEYS: PRISON-LIKE SURVEILLANCE AND PUNISHMENT NULLIFY VALIDITY OF NATIONAL IN-SCHOOL ELECTRONIC STUDENT SELF-DISCLOSURE OF DRUG USE
Results lacking validity yet uniformly celebrated as remarkable public health gains are nullified by overt methodological flaws and alternate sources of valid evidence establishing a worsening youth nicotine crisis
by Clark Miller
Published March 17, 2025
Anyone like me attempting to follow research, trends and related information on use of e-cigarettes (“vaping”) by youth using internet searches would likely have noticed some of the same trends and heightened themes over past years.
Those might have included through pre-pandemic, pandemic, and post-pandemic periods intense interest in variable surges in incidence of use by school-age kids with intensifying appearance in news reports of “epidemic”, “crisis”, and multiplying physical health conditions associated with use.
My searches shifted to increasingly include signs of escalation of a war of sorts, waged in schools, with search results commonly including elements linked to:
– rapid evolution in product development and sales of vape devices whose appearance allowed easier avoidance of detection
– surging popularity of flavored and disposable vapes
– links with “crackdown” or “crack down” in the context of what needed to happen to control behaviors of youth using such vapes and seemingly winning the war
– emerging appearance of countermeasures by schools with “detector” appearing a lot along with “bathrooms” and strengthened consequences for violators
“Harsh” may not quite capture the reported experiences of students like Thomas Williams-Platt or of high school senior Aaliyah Iglesias, who “didn’t realize how much could be taken from her”.
Suddenly, the rest of her high school experience was threatened: being student council president, her role as debate team captain and walking at graduation. Even her college scholarships were at risk. She was sent to the district’s alternative school for 30 days and told she could have faced criminal charges.
Like thousands of other students around the country, she was caught by surveillance equipment that schools have installed to crack down on electronic cigarettes, often without informing students. ..
She immediately was pulled from the debate tournament and her coach told her she could face charges because she was 18. She was sent to her district’s alternative school for 30 days, which was the minimum punishment for students caught vaping under Tyler schools’ zero-tolerance policy.
Students found vaping also can receive a misdemeanor citation and be fined up to $100. Students found with vapes containing THC, the chemical that makes marijuana users feel high, can be arrested on felony charges. At least 90 students in Tyler have faced misdemeanor or felony charges.
The Tyler district declined to comment on the disciplinary actions, saying in a written statement that tracking of vape usage addresses a problem that is hurting children’s health.
Their schools in Texas are not the exceptions instead, in perhaps slightly more draconian and overzealous forms, the rule as the same types of measures and responses took hold widespread in pre-pandemic years and have continued.
An Oklahoma school system as reported in October 2024 had adopted detection systems and consequences of detection including:
“If the vape is a nicotine vape, the student is sent to our in-school suspension class for five days on the first violation and 10 days on a second violation during the same school year,” Goss said. “If the vape contains THC or other controlled substances, the discipline is assigned based on that substance.”
Each of these schools has policies that allow inspections of lockers, classrooms, other school buildings, and school parking lots by school officials, law enforcement officials and “drug-sniffing” dogs.
According to the Hulbert Student Handbook, if on any occasion a student is found to be in possession of, under the influence of, or selling illegal substances or alcohol, that student and any confiscated materials will be given over to custody of state law enforcement officials, and parents or guardians will be notified. All students who participate in extracurricular activities may be randomly drug-tested throughout the school year, according to policy.
From a September 2024 NPR report,
“more schools are installing high-tech vape detectors in bathrooms and locker rooms to curb student use of e-cigarettes. Some districts are using money from a $1.7 billion legal settlement against e-cigarette manufacturer Juul Labs to pay for the devices”.
And from that report …
The Lincoln Public Schools district in Nebraska received about $1 million from the Juul settlement and is using the money to install vape detectors in its high schools and, eventually, the middle schools.
As part of a pilot program launched last year, the district put the devices in restrooms and locker rooms at Lincoln East High School. It didn’t take long for vaping violations to decrease, says Ryan Zabawa, the district’s director of student services. In the first week of activation in October 2023, school officials received nearly 100 vaping alerts. By Christmas break, that number had dropped to just four. The district has since installed detectors in a second high school.
“It absolutely is a deterrent,” Zabawa says. Without the detectors, policing the restrooms and locker rooms for vaping was a “cat and mouse” game, he says. “Kids were doing it, but you couldn’t prove it. And you really wanted to try and get it stopped.” …
Councilwoman Joann Ariola sees the legislation as a first step toward intervention for students. She also hopes that a crackdown in schools will help thwart the illegal sales of e-cigarettes.
“We get calls all the time about stores that are selling vapes illegally to minors,” she says. “These minors are using those vapes while they’re in school, while they’re at playgrounds. Parents are absolutely concerned, and rightly so.”
Likely few readers, or anyone applying some level of thought to these reports, could fail to see and conclude what is obvious – that with implementation of these measures, far from achieving the primitive, reactive, impulse-driven goal “to get it stopped”, students will be compelled to go farther underground, to shift strategies to be undetected and avoid the consequences, to adjust.
An NBC News report portrays the emergence of the new in-school war on drugs more concretely, focusing on detection and enforcement with little apparent concern for underlying psychological effects.
War has psychological effects, and for these students in ways unhealthy and healthy, likely including adjustments to increase distance between themselves and the reactive, threatening officials and disinvest in their educational experience, driven by loss of positive regard and respect for adults in their lives and driven by higher levels of fear, paranoia, loss of trust . . . and anger.
From that AP report,
“On social media, students around the country describe ways to outsmart the sensors. Some report covering them in plastic wrap. Others say they blow the smoke into their clothes.”
And again from the NPR report: in possibly unguarded moments, some perpetrators can see the futility of it.
Leslie Ricciardelli, the superintendent for Florida’s Collier County Public Schools, acknowledges that some students will vape off campus regardless of the school’s approach to the problem.
The most potent potential harms of expansion of the School Surveillance System are psychological and associated behavioral changes by students to avoid consequences potentially derailing their lives and social worlds, and to protect a sense of an autonomous and safe self, at the cost of loss of positive connection to adults and systems responsible for supporting them.
The ACLU’s New York-based senior policy counsel, Chad Marlow, says surveillance technologies such as vape detectors can undermine “student relationships with the teachers and administrators who we want them to trust.”
Yes.
And that’s not the worst of it. As reported for some schools,
At the Coppell Independent School District in Texas, sensors are part of a prevention strategy that includes educational videos and a tip line. Students can receive $50 for reporting vaping by peers and “they were turning each other in right and left,” said Jennifer Villines, the district’s director of student and staff services.
Allow that to sink in for a minute, trying to put yourself in the mindset of a middle or high school teen,
even to empathize with the overwhelming need to fit in, be cool, vaping with others as part of that connection.
Maybe you can remember how aggressively stupid those DARE talks were. But you weren’t being monitored, spied on, threatened with the felt existential banishment to an alternative school with loss of social connections for using nicotine, or being ratted out by peers for reward, with the real threat of legal charges, impacts on your plans for college, whatever your parents might have in store for you.
Now add context – of as a teen having developed a level of critical thinking skills sufficient to see, as for anyone with those skills, that the ways your life was unnecessarily disrupted over COVID was much, much more about the reckless incompetence, criminal thinking errors and other characterological traits of trusted adults in authority than about any legitimate concerns about your or anyone’s safety.
Now add the context: that if you are a teen using a mood-altering substance daily, compulsively, there is almost predictably the background of adverse factors (ACE) experienced over childhood in your immediate or extended family, or elsewhere – of neglect, of abuse, of problem licit or illicit substance use by adults with effects on you that persisted because it was never stopped, never as subject to monitoring, detection, risk and consequences as yours is now, instead persisting because it was normalized and enabled.
Those are conditions and contexts under which felt emotional injury, distrust, disrepect, fear, and anger are healthy responses.
Now imagine going to school one day, being handed a tablet or laptop –
not yours, but provided by the school – reminded that you’re getting it because you are identified as having been part of a national survey for years, and being asked to use the tablet to respond accurately to questions about a variety of areas of your personal life including drug use.
Yes, we’ve spent a lot of paragraphs on creating something before getting to detailed consideration, as we will shortly, of problems with validity of recent, celebrated surveys constructed to support claims of remarkable gains in youth drug use habits.
Here’s why.
What we’ve created and considered represents an attempt to understand to some extent the psychological and mental status of kids attempting to cope with life, to engage in their healthy developmental tasks, and to function in an educational setting without impairing anxiety, while attempting to cope with conditions imposed on them by a resurrected, high-tech, high stakes war on drugs in their schools.
If we have any expectation of helping them to grow out of and to begin to avoid problem substance use with serious impacts, it is those factors, not others, we need to focus on and understand, something that would be an entirely new undertaking.
That undertaking needs to begin with an understanding of youth substance use to evaluate the validity of those claims of gains and to gain accurate assessments of youth substance use and other epidemics.
Let’s start with a preview and overview
Reported late in 2024 (December 14), nursing staff for Escambia County schools in Florida provided to local media direct observations of vaping increasing in their schools, following national media celebrations of decreases reported from the two national surveys that year and celebrated as remarkable public health triumphs.
Having directly observed and/or measured levels of youth vaping there – as in other schools we’ll consider – school officials asserted, “We know that the use of e-cigarettes is on the rise” and explaining that, “According to the Florida Youth Surveys, there is an increasing trend in reported vaping usage among students in Escambia County”.
Most importantly, Escambia school staff were not afraid to make the obvious observations about the incongruence between what they could see is happening in their schools versus national survey results.
More troubling is that underreporting on youth surveys may limit our understanding of the full scope of the issue. Reasons for underreporting range from social stigma, anonymity concerns, misunderstanding questions, and fear of consequences. Questioning the results of youth surveys and addressing reasons for underreporting is critical for effective prevention and intervention strategies.
The national youth behaviors surveys
Through 2024 my online searches to keep up with youth vaping twice peaked with frenzies of media reports celebrating results of two national surveys of youth substance use, with superlatives to celebrate the “lowest” levels of surveyed youth vaping for years or longer and the associated remarkable public health victory represented by survey results, e.g., “monumental public health win”.
It’s important to ground ourselves as a first step in a critically important consideration: that these surveys are presented and messaged – and potentially have value – as providing a picture of prevalence of problem substance use in a demographic, an age group, of vulnerable Americans, in this case young people, school-aged youth.
The surveys were conducted in schools, reaching only those members of the target population (youth) enrolled in school and attending regularly enough to be present on a day the surveys were administered.
Let’s consider. Studies have found that pandemic years and stressors including school disruptions have had profound effects on school attendance.
Some reported figures include that over post-pandemic years, “Public school enrollment remained depressed, down by over 1 million students”. Reasons offered have been related to pandemic stressors and disruptions,”Some experienced homelessness, lost interest or motivation, or struggled with mental health. Some needed to work or assume adult responsibilities. Some fell behind in online school and didn’t see the point of re-engaging.”
That figure is for students not enrolled or attending at all. The figure for “chronic absenteeism” (defined in most states as being enrolled and missing 18 days or more of the school year) is 6.5 million.
Right. 6.5 million.
Across the country, students have been absent at record rates since schools reopened during the pandemic. More than a quarter of students missed at least 10% of the 2021-22 school year, making them chronically absent, according to the most recent data available. Before the pandemic, only 15% of students missed that much school.
All told, an estimated 6.5 million additional students became chronically absent, according to the data, which was compiled by Stanford University education professor Thomas Dee in partnership with The Associated Press. Taken together, the data from 40 states and Washington, D.C., provides the most comprehensive accounting of absenteeism nationwide. Absences were more prevalent among Latino, Black and low-income students, according to Dee’s analysis.
Considering the array of pandemic period stressors and associated psychosocial factors along with those consequently acting on kids staying out of school, this selection bias presents as a profoundly potent factor, independent of any other considerations, distorting and predicting underestimates of youth problem substance use by these surveys.
Some more detailed aspects of survey methods for the Monitoring the Future survey include:
– Only young people attending school are included
– Surveys are completed in school during class hours, with unknown inclusion of students attending sporadically
– Students dropping out of school prior to graduation are excluded
– For minor students (less than 18 years of age) signed informed consent is required by parent(s), with unknown filtering related to level of family stress and dysfunction; neglect; incapacity; or wariness, mistrust, or other inhibiting factor.
Get the picture? Right, that’s called selection bias, and the ways these biases would affect outcomes seem predictable.
It turns out that on consideration of the available evidence, those factors alone invalidate conclusions of the national surveys as grossly underestimating problem substance use for youth, covered in this recent post.
In another, less recent previous post, I outlined additional ways that the national Monitoring the Future survey violates principles of design that predict lack of internal and external validity and compel us to predict significant error in under-measuring youth problem substance use.
From that post –
But what about those “long downward trends”
that illustrate how much drug-related risk is lowering for youth?
They came from the Monitoring the Future report that surveys 8, 10 and 12th grade students in the U.S. each year. What does that report tell us about risk related to regular or problem use of mood altering substances by youth?
Take a look at the drop-down in the interactive graphical collection of results for all substances surveyed for. Note that some substances that don’t appear are gabapentin, benzodiazepines, opioid, and fentanyl.
That raises the question: How can we explain and award confidence to the external validity (accuracy) of the MTF survey results in the context of a doubling among teens in lethal overdose incidence from 2019 to 2020 and remaining at that level without the survey results indicating any increases in opioid use or other drugs?
Because “fentanyl” or “opioid” were not surveyed? Because of inherent flaws in survey methods?
From the NYT piece –
There are some sobering caveats to the good news. One is that teen overdose deaths have sharply risen, with fentanyl-involved deaths among adolescents doubling from 2019 to 2020 and remaining at that level in the subsequent years.
For drugs that are prescribed vs illicit, students are asked to answer for their use if the substance was not prescribed to them, that is illicit use.
Here’s one substance that does not fit the long downward trend pattern – increasingly prescribed ADHD stimulants.
The scale for this graphic distorts and downplays what clearly is an upturn trend in prevalence of use beginning 2021 for both grades surveyed.
That would appear to be congruent with longstanding, now rampant, misdiagnosis, misprescription, and abuse for these stimulant medications for youth and adults.
Back to our current post
and the two main national youth surveys celebrated as pointing to a remarkable public health triumph.
The Monitoring the Future survey is conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and funded by NIDA. The survey is given annually to students in eighth, 10th, and 12th grades who self-report their substance use behaviors over various time periods, such as past 30 days, past 12 months, and lifetime. The survey also documents students’ perceptions of harm, disapproval of use, and perceived availability of drugs. ..
All participating students took the survey via the web – either on tablets or on a computer – with 99% of respondents taking the survey in-person in school in 2024.
Also released last year, 2024, were results of the National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS), an annual survey similar in sample population and methodology to the MTF survey and with data analyzed by the FDA and CDC.
Per this report,
The National Youth Tobacco Survey is an annual, school-based, self-administered survey of U.S. students in middle (grades 6 to 8) and high school (grades 9 to 12).
Survey Methods and Findings
In the new National Youth Tobacco Survey, researchers asked U.S. youths to answer questions regarding their e-cigarette and nicotine pouch use between January 22 and May 22, 2024.
The researchers found that the proportion of U.S. middle school and high school students who reported current e-cigarette use within the past 30 days decreased from 7.7% (n = 2.13 million) in 2023 to 5.9% (n = 1.63 million) in 2024. The decline was largely driven by reduced e-cigarette use among high school students (1.56 million to 1.21 million), with no statistically significant change in current e-cigarette use among middle school students within the past 1 year. The researchers noted that the number of youths who reported using e-cigarettes in 2024 was approximately one-third of what it was at its peak in 2019, when over 5 million youths reported current e-cigarette use.
Responses of top experts were no less confident and positive than for the MTF survey –
“The continued decline in e-cigarette use among our nation’s youths is a monumental public health win,” highlighted Brian King, PhD, MPH, Director of the Center for Tobacco Products at the FDA. “This progress is a testament to the relentless efforts by the FDA, CDC, and others, particularly over the past half decade.
What do we know about surveys relying on self-report
for substance use, and for substance use by youth?
A 1994 “review and meta-analysis” study of validity of self-report of smoking (cigarettes) including by youth (students) concluded that degree of validity as evaluated by biomarker confirmation
“proved quite variable among studies, as shown in Table 1, suggesting that specific aspects of the setting, study population, measurement methods, and study purpose are important to the accuracy of smoking self-reports”.
and that
“results suggest that interviewer-administered questionnaires yielded higher estimates of sensitivity and specificity than did self-administered questionnaires”.
and
“Even in the most conservative analyses, student self-reports had lower sensitivity than studies using reports from subjects in the general population; however, the results were not always statistically significant. That is, students appear more likely to deny smoking, even when biochemical measures classify them as smokers. This is not surprising, since smoking by minors is illegal in most states and many young tobacco users have not yet defined themselves as smokers. Both of these conditions would contribute to a tendency, whether conscious (fear of being found out) or unconscious (self-definition inconsistent with behavior), to underreport.”
In a study published February 2025, biological verification of tobacco smoking for Chinese adolescents providing school-based self-reports on surveys showed underestimate of self-report “current smoking” by 30 percent.
Another recent study, published February 2025, looked at self-reports by U.S. teens of nicotine use by vaping and smoking, compared to biomarker validation, and before and after legal smoking age rose from 18 to 21.
As reported in Medical Xpress,
Based on survey data, young adults covered by Tobacco 21 (T21) laws say they are smoking less. Biomarkers paint a smokier picture. Despite recent reports of tobacco bans’ success, new research shows 18- to 20-year-olds are finding ways to get cigarettes and vapes. Traces of nicotine and tobacco in their bodies prove it.
First-of-its-kind research developed by Wake Forest University economist Erik Nesson and published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Health Economics shows that since the enactment of state T21 laws between 2016 and 2019, young adults aged 18–20 are more likely to report that they don’t smoke—although a study of biomarkers for their tobacco and nicotine exposure tells a different story. ..
What makes this new study unique?
PATH data include self-reported answers to survey questions in addition to the results of medical tests that detect biomarkers for tobacco and nicotine exposure.
Nesson’s study, “The effects of tobacco 21 laws on smoking and vaping: Evidence from panel data and biomarkers,” is the first to analyze both the PATH survey data and the biomarker results, which makes all the difference.
“When you measure tobacco use using only self-reported survey data, you find T21 policies are effective at reducing tobacco use, especially cigarette smoking,” said Nesson. “But when you measure the same young adults’ recent exposure to tobacco through biomarkers in their urine, you don’t see any changes in recent exposure. Policymakers need to be aware of the unintended consequences of the policies they put in place. Sometimes they can be positive, but sometimes they can be negative.”
[Emphasis added]
Let’s keep in mind a critically important point.
None of the studies just cited and consistently pointing to significantly under-measured, invalid results for self-report of substance use, specifically nicotine, were based on survey settings or conditions that rise to the level of predicted inhibition of provision of accurate responses as the two national surveys in question, that we are evaluating.
If that’s not apparent, please return to the top of this post and review the linked news pieces describing the levels of use of surveillance, detection, threat, and consequences facing students who were recently surveyed.
Whatever degrees of distortion and diminished validity are indicated by the biomarker studies cited, new conditions for the recent national surveys compel us to assume that predicted validity for those results is lower yet.
And let’s turn to ways to further evaluate that
One of the measures of youth vape use most confidently predicted to have high validity is sales of the “flavor categories like fruit, candy, mint, menthol and desserts” consumed almost exclusively by youth, thus predicted to be a reliable measure. According to reports, sales of those products have been increasing steadily and dramatically – “47 percent increase in e-cigarette unit sales at U.S. retail outlets* from 2019 through 2023, with flavor categories like fruit, candy, mint, menthol and desserts accounting for more than 80 percent of those sales.”
Through 2024, those trends have continued, “Total e-cigarette unit sales increased by 34.7% (15.7 million units to 21.1 million units) between February 2, 2020 and June 16, 2024” with the flavored products used by youth remaining at just over 80%.
That is to say, by valid measures of youth use of nicotine by vaping, it has continued to increase over the period celebrated in universal consensus by America’s medical/media collusion as representing an “unprecedented”, remarkable public health achievement in reduction of youth vaping.
Those figures are underestimates. We know that because the sales data for the products included in the analyses are restricted, as noted in the Truth Initiative report –
*Retail sales data from Circana are market-level representative for covered brick-and mortar retailers (e.g., food and grocery stores, drug stores/pharmacies, convenience stores, mass merchandisers, club stores, dollar stores and military stores/exchanges). Data do not include purchase age and are not representative of online sales or sales from tobacco or vape specialty stores. Data were analyzed by the CDC Foundation and Truth Initiative.
Additional sources of evidence and reports that are not predicted or established as flawed and providing invalid results, as are the national surveys we’re considering, include reports from observers rather than the youth surveyed like this study that surveyed teachers, principals and “district leaders” in December 2024.
Here’s another source of valid observational outcomes not distorted by student self report – observations of trends in prevalence of vaping by school-aged kids by parents, teachers, and vaping and non-vaping students.
Then there’s the additional evidence,
the widespread and accumulating body of data, results including local survey results, and collected observations across locales and the U.S. and beyond, of trends of increasing youth vaping (and smoking of traditional tobacco cigarettes) that belie the fabricated outcomes of our debunked national self-report surveys.
Easily available by online search and too many to describe individually here. There are, for example, the numerous examples of survey results for which the claim of reduced smoking or vaping based on a change of fewer self reports of “current use” (current use = at least one instance of use of a vape over the past 30 days, the single measure used in the two national surveys in question) is contradicted by increase in self-report of “frequent” (20 or more uses in the past 30 days) or “daily” use.
Which measures seem more meaningful for our understanding of trends and how problematic they might be for youth vaping? The measure that includes a positive response for someone who did or did not use a vape on one occasion over 30 days, maybe impulsively and uncharacteristically with friends, versus measures of frequent (on 20 or more days over the past 30) or daily, indicating the high likelihood of nicotine dependence?
Anyone? Anyone?
Right.
Here is an example of media spin of survey results, from Wisconsin, that illustrates multiple apparently intentional distortions.
First, the headline,
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (WDPI), in collaboration with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has released the results of the 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS). This biennial survey assesses health-risk behaviors among Wisconsin high school students, ranging from nutrition and mental health to substance use. The latest findings reveal a significant decline in the use of traditional tobacco products and a noteworthy decrease in vaping since its peak in 2019. …
E-cigarettes have also been a focal point for policymakers concerned about youth vaping. In 2023, 34.4% of students had tried e-cigarettes, and 15.7% reported current use. E-cigarette use peaked in 2019 when nearly half (45.5%) of Wisconsin high school students had tried them and 20.6% were current users. Between 2019 and 2023, ever-use of e-cigarettes among students declined by 24.4% and current use by 23.8%.
[emphasis added]
When truth lies buried,
some digging is required to expose it. Let’s take a look.
Let’s consider in this example the reported indications for youth vaping trends in light of the actual survey results.
Per the news account, “Between 2019 and 2023, ever-use of e-cigarettes among students declined by 24.4% and current use by 23.8%”, ostensibly supporting the headline assertions that “Youth Tobacco And Vaping Use Has Declined In Wisconsin”.
“Current use” dropping by 23.8% refers to QN36, which surveyed for use “on at least one day during the 30 days before the survey”, and we note that in the original report, there is “No linear change” noted, and between 2021 and 2023, there is an apparent increase in percent of respondents positive for vaping.
For QN35, “ever used”, by including the much higher 2019 value, a linear decreasing trend was detected, and again there is an increase from 2021 to 2023, the salient trend for our understanding of most current trends in vaping prevalence.
Looking at frequent and daily use – the measures we should be most concerned about – again, there is clearly for most recent years and trend, no downward trend 2021 to 2023, with appearance of indications of increases.
That is, there is nothing in the actual survey results to support the lie of recent decrease in vaping by youth, instead the opposite.
It may be natural to digress to simply note that the sociopathic (or “criminal”) mind or personality is not remarkable for intelligence in any meaningful conceptualization of that capacity, while certainly seeming to evidence learned traits of shrewdness and deviousness, illustrated daily for us almost consistently in media accounts and authoritative, official, and expert conveyances generally.
In addition to the specific examples noted and examined, searches of related news topics will reveal many instances of state-, school district-, or locale-specific independent surveys that have belied results of the national surveys in question.
The reasons for more accurate, valid outcomes may be various. For example, for a third national 2023 survey, the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS), about half of states went to electronic devices for the first time for collecting responses, while slightly more than half retained paper-and-pencil questionnaires – a form we would predict to provide students a greater sense of security in identity anonymity and safety in providing accurate responses under current conditions in schools.
So, for example, in Tennessee –
In Colorado –
In Connecticut –
In Deleware –
Division of Prevention and Behavioral Health Services Director Aileen Fink says overdose deaths among youth remain remarkably low, with only 1-3 deaths for 18-20 year-olds over the past few years.
But Fink began noticing a different substance use trend among Delaware youth, and with the Department of Services for Children, Youth and their Families consistently struggling to recruit youth behavioral health providers, Fink commissioned a 9-month needs assessment effort to better understand the problem.
While opioid use among youth is low, alcohol and marijuana use, along with vaping, continue to rise among middle schoolers and high schoolers, with 1 in 5 Delaware youth over the age of 12 having reported binge drinking within the month they were surveyed.
And elsewhere predictably.
Why predictably?
Because that is what the consistent evidence tells us, clearly. Not the invalid, distorted evidence used to spin lies, but the evidence we can confidently believe provides a valid and accurate picture of trends in risk to vulnerable youth compulsively using substances, something important to have if we are to begin to help protect them from harm.
