We all know drinking and smoking is almost a rite of passage for some high school students - but a new study shows how alarmingly widespread alcohol, marijuana and tobacco abuse are among teens and pre-teens. It is a report from the Inter-American Observatory on Drugs which compiles a comparative analysis of drug use among high school students in 13 Caribbean countries. Belize participated fully and almost two thousand students between the ages of younger than 14 and older than 17 were asked a long list of questions about drug usage habits.
The 132 page report is loaded, but some of the statistics that jumped out at us include this one about binge drinking - which means having had five or more alcoholic drinks in the last two weeks. 21.9% of the Belize respondents said it had happened once, 16.4% said it had happened two to three times, while 6.4% said it had happened four to five times - which is the highest amongst any of the 13 countries.
And then there's heavy binge drinking which is defined as four or more binge drinking episodes in 2 weeks. Guyana at 17.1% and Belize at 13.6% are the countries with the highest prevalence of heavy binge drinking.
Moving now to cigarettes, Belize's respondents were also among the very highest in terms of who all had tried cigarettes. A third of the respondents, said they had tried a cigarette in their lifetime
Belize was also among the highest when asked about using alcohol in the past month. Just about a third of the respondents said they had - which tied Dominica for the highest incidence.
And as for those who had smoke cigarettes in the past month, Belize at 8.1% was also the highest.
That's a small snapshot of the statistics for alcohol and tobacco use - but it's a lot of figures to digest, so later on we'll tell you about what the study showed about marijuana use - which is the most widely used illegal substance among youths in the Caribbean.
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