Epidemiologic Trends of Adolescent Use of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Other Drugs

This article provides an overview of adolescent substance abuse, including rates of use, risk and protective factors, and demographic trends for various licit and illicit drugs. Most of this article focuses on adolescent tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana use, because these 3 substances are most commonly used among this age group. Significantly less research has been conducted on the use of other substances among adolescents, because these areas are substantially less problematic. For this reason, a basic overview of rates of use of these substances is included in the article to provide a general sense of patterns of use, whereas the remainder of the article focuses on the most commonly used substances. Table 1 provides an overview of all of the information sources used to compile this article. Table 1 Overview of information sources