SANDAG: Drug Use In Juvenile Offenders Highest In 19 Years

Speaker 1: 00:00 The number of young people in juvenile detention and San Diego testing positive for illicit drugs is at a 19 year high. This is according to the latest data from the San Diego County Substance Abuse Monitoring Program, or Sam. Dr Is Cynthia Burke, head of the sandbags criminal justice research division. Spoke to KPBS evening edition Anchor Ebony Monet about those disturbing numbers. Speaker 2: 00:26 Welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having me. How did you collect this data? So this used to be a part of a large national study when locally when that funding ended, we were the only site that's been able to continue to talk to both juveniles and adults who are arrested and booked into our juvenile hall or our local jails. Um, as part of that, they would have to admit on the street within the past 48 hours because we do get a urine sample. Um, we go in there a few months out of the year and it's all voluntary, confidential, anonymous. We're trying to get some objective data about drug use trends and other risk factors over time. Your research found that about 57% of participants, um, reported abusing prescription drugs with tranquilizers being the number one choice of that. Um, how is this different from previous years? It's up since 2014, it was 35%. Speaker 2: 01:15 So we've seen a steady increase. Those youth who say that they've abused the prescription drugs, which means they took a prescription drug that was not prescribed for them. Many of them are saying it's easy to get. They're either being given it by and in another individual or about a one in three are saying they're taking it from somebody. It's either a family member, a stranger. So I think it's important for people to take advantages to get rid of those prescription drugs that they're not using. Many of the youth that we talk to who have abused prescription drugs are also saying they're using street drugs. So it's not just one or the other. So one thing that surprised me was the, the age reported from the participants about when they first experimented or try to list the drugs. Could you talk about those findings? Yeah. Um, so, uh, we know that 96% of these youth to try to at least one drug, 68% had tried at least one of the gateway drugs, which has alcohol, marijuana, tobacco, most of those are trying alcohol or marijuana. Speaker 2: 02:06 First. The average age was under 13, around 12. Um, for both those who tried marijuana and alcohol first, I think that's an important message whether your child is in the system or not, but just to maybe have some of those conversations earlier than a parent might think that they need to. And especially with prescription drugs, I know that there's been some blue pills out there who have, you know, some very tragic consequences. So with a lot of these substances nowadays, you don't know what you're taking. So that was surprising to me as a researcher. Any surprises? Um, you know, I think the, uh, we've seen a big shift, um, in marijuana perception, uh, in 2018, which is the year that we collected this data, only 11% of the juveniles thought that marijuana could have any harmful consequence. And we know that's not the case. When you know that there's higher levels of THC and the drug people are now dabbing in vaping it using very high concentrations of the drug and that's changed from 42% in 2007. Speaker 2: 02:58 They uh, so they 11% thought it was bad, 33% thought alcohol could be bad, 60% for tobacco. So there's been a real shift in what you think how harmful marijuana can be for them. That was one of the biggest things. The other thing that we saw that was um, I think interesting and is actually a positive finding with spice as a synthetic marijuana marijuana. And we saw a number of deaths from that. The um, number of jurisdictions tried to take steps to try to prevent the distribution sale at that. And we saw only 14% of the youth who tried spice last year. And at his height it was a 48% over half, um, around half. So, and this study also tracked risk factors, which were the most common, well, so we use these data, we think it's important to be able to understand the needs of the youth in the system as well as what factors might could be preventative once truancy about four and five of those youth we talked to have been true from school. Speaker 2: 03:49 Um, many of them have parents who have justice system contact or who you've abused drugs too. So I think when you're looking at dealing with it's important to maybe think about family units and looking at individuals who have those underlying needs and how do we address family units who may be at greater risk to, to change a trajectory for a youth before it may be too late. And there really is a serious addiction. Um, there, we know many of the youth may be running away, running away, used to be a status fence that could get them in to juvenile hall. So I think at looking at some of those underlying factors of why is a youth acting out, I'm CPS contact by the family and we also know about one in five. Also said that they had Su, uh, suicidal ideations. They had thought seriously about suicide. Speaker 2: 04:29 We know that, um, substance abuse and juveniles or adults, they may want to self medicate cause they have underlying issues there. It's kind of the chicken or the egg, what comes first, mental health issues or substance abuse. So I think it's really important to look at individuals and family units as a whole. And as you mentioned, even after the federal funding dried up, SANDAG felt it was important enough to continue with this research to continue. Why do you find that it's so important to continue this research? How does this information, this data help help us help the children? Right. So, um, the funding that we get comes from our federal law enforcement partners as well as from the county of San Diego. And I think this has important information both for prevention, um, for treatment and for law enforcement because we're able to track trends over time. Speaker 2: 05:14 Any other data that you see is self report, so we don't have that urine sample. Being able to objectively know what drug use is going up and down over time. I think that people could say, well, how does this, you know, relate to my youth, my child who's not in the system? It is important for us to know about the youth in the system and their underlying needs. But I think a lot of these drug use behaviors that might be by youth who have more risk taking behavior could be a precursor, be able to say, okay, if it's going on with this population, it could be coming down the line for other groups. So how do we get ahead of it? Dr. Cynthia Burke, thank you so much. Thank you. And she was speaking to KPBS is Ebony Monet.