The Prevention team at Sitka Counseling conducts a Community Readiness and Substance Use survey every two-to-four years. It’s a pretty broad look at how prepared the community is to address the problems that come with substance misuse among youth, like the availability of treatment services, and the overall awareness of local leadership of the issue.
But a component of the survey goes into Sitka’s middle- and high schools, and the preliminary findings are mixed.
“Overall, the trends from 2017 for all the substances are slowly going down,” said Loyd Platson, Prevention Director for Sitka Counseling. “We had a big decrease during the pandemic. It’s starting to come back up, but it’s still lower than it was in 2017. So that’s the good news.”
The other good news is that over 80-percent of Sitka’s middle- and high school students report using no substances whatsoever in the last thirty days.
A disturbing reversal, however, is that girls have overtaken boys in substance use.
“What we’re discovering now is that there’s been a trend for the last five years or so that female youth are using at a higher level,” said Platson. “ This year all the substances – alcohol, tobacco, marijuana and prescription medication – female use was a lot higher than male use. That’s a really disturbing piece of data that we have.”
Platson says Sitka’s survey results are consistent with national data, but the trend needs to be addressed at the community level.
“What are the risks associated with alcohol? If I’m using alcohol, my judgment goes down,” he said. “There’s a lot of other social risks that are involved in that, especially for females, in terms of being in situations where they’re at higher risk – especially if they’re using alcohol.”
Sitka Counseling can’t use survey answers to target individuals who may need access to education or treatment. A third-party contractor processes the responses, and Prevention Program manager Michelle Kavouras says not even the schools or Sitka Counseling ever see raw data.
“I think it’s important to mention, too, that this is all anonymous,” said Kavouras. “We have no way to track who said what. So (there’s no) stigma preventing people from actually being honest when they’re filling out these surveys.”
Messaging apparently can help. Decades of warnings about the risk of smoking tobacco have had an impact. Platson says this is showing up in Sitka’s survey results.
“When we look at perception of risk, one of the things that becomes interesting is that youth perceive the use of marijuana one-to-two times to three times per week as the lowest risk of any of the substances,” said Platson. “Tobacco – smoking tobacco – is the highest perception of risk. And so you see less use of tobacco than you do of marijuana.”
Sitka Counseling has already prepared reports for schools; another report for the community is still to come.
