Drug ARM WA often gets requests from school students asking for help with various school assignments. This page is designed to be a starting point.

Frequently asked questions

1) Do you have any statistics and information on drugs you can send me?

The short answer yes but it's too much. There is lots of information and lots of statistics on drugs. Google alone will give you millions of pages for a search on statistics on drugs. Not all of these pages will give you good accurate information.

For statistics on Western Australian teenage alcohol and illicit drug use have a look at the ASSAD Survey (Australian School Students Alcohol and Drugs survey) for other drugs.For Australia wide statistics on drug use look at the National Drug Strategy Household Survey. These are all available on our Usefull Links page in the Surveys and Statistics section.

For general information on Drugs look at our Drug Information page.

2) Why do teenagers use drugs?

This can be a hard question to answer and reasons vary from person to person. These are the results from two studies on the topic.

Study by Johnston and O’Malley (1986)
Enjoyment 65% Relieve tension 41% Curiosity 54% Cope with problems 22% Get high 49% Fit in 13%

Study by the Brisbane youth service (1999)
Relaxation 62.7% Fun 54.9% Stress relief 54.9% It feels good 43% Habit 41.1% To escape from pain 35.2% To cope 31.3% Boredom 29.4% To be sociable 25.4% To feel normal 25.4% To be more confident 19.6% Because everyone does 3.9%

One thing worth noting in both of these results is that peer pressure is not as high as most people think. Often people don't take drug's because their peers pressure them to but rather because the people that they trust (often just their peers) do.

3) How do we solve the drug problem?

This is a tough one to answer . If you look at The DAO Webiste The "Western Australian Drug & Alcohol Strategy 2005 - 2009" article explains, in complicated detail, what the West Australian Drug and Alcohol office is doing. One helpful thing that this article says is that “Drug use is rarely motivated by a single purpose or serves a single function;” (pg 4) in other words different people use different drugs for different reasons at different times. So, some people might use a drug because they are bored and think it might be something fun to do, another person might use a drug because they are under a lot of stress and are hoping the drug will help them to cope with that stress. The answer to how we might reduce drug use for these two people will be very different.

A helpful thing might be, instead of asking “how we can reduce drugs in our community”, to start asking how I can reduce drugs in my circle of friends, or people in my year at school .

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If you have any further questions you can call the office on (08) 9497-9498 or email Drug ARM WA at drugarm@drugarmwa.org.au