Prevalence of drug abuse and its behavioral, social, economic and health impacts on the case of school students

ABSTRACT Prevalence of drug abuse has apparently increased from time to time in Ethiopia the extent of drug abuse is not yet well identified. A survey and FGD was conducted to asses the prevalence of drug abuse and its behavioral, socio-economic and health impacts among Shashemene and Awassa secondary school students in Ethiopia. The towns were selected strategically while 1 government and 1 private school were selected randomly from each of the towns. Proportionate stratified random sampling technique was used to select 828 students from Shashemene and 918 students from Awassa which makes the total sample size 1746. An anonymous self administered questionnaire was originally prepared in English and later translated to Amharic the official language in Ethiopia. Pilot testing was conducted and adjustments were done prior data collection. 26 of the respondents quitted as a result 1720 female and male grade 9 - 12 private and government school students participated. Finally data was collected by the help of 46 trained enumerators from January 17 - February 15, 2008. Focus Group Discussion was conducted with 48 key informants selected from Shashemene and Awassa towns. During the data analysis process 39 of the questionnaires were eliminated due to missing information as a result the size of the questionnaire came down to 1681. Finally by using SPSS version 11 descriptive statistics, mean, Chi-square test, t-test and ANOVA were computed. The finding of the present study showed alarmingly high prevalence of drug use. In fact, over 40 percent of the drug users reported multiple drug abuse. Among the drugs in question alcohol, khat & inhalants emerged to be the top three most abused substances. Cocaine & heroine are not familiar in the present study areas as the use of both drugs wasn't reported even by a single student. The percent of drug user students is found to be more for Shashemene than Awassa and for government than private school students. Consequently, the hypothesis that stated the percent of drug users will be more for Shashemene