Amusing article in today’s SCMP about the results of the four-yearly survey on drug abuse by HK pupils. Turns out 90% of the primary and secondary schools in our little territory have students taking psychotropic drugs. Just to clarify: we’re talking about schools here, not 9 out of 10 of pupils at these schools. In primary schools, 1.6% of pupils have taken drugs at least once, in secondary schools this number jumps to 4.3% and at universities it’s 2.9%.

Forget about primary and secondary schools for a second. Did you seriously read that only 2.9% of university students has experiences with drugs? Yes you did. Before you become fussy about the word ‘psychotropic’, this basically means all types of drugs, including marijuana and even caffeine. We’ll just assume that coffee wasn’t labeled a drug too by our researchers, although you never you know in this town. Anyway, back to our uni students. Of course, despite the anonymous nature of the survey, quite a few might have lied. Nevertheless, wethinks the remaining 97.1% should at least try a joint in this supposedly exciting period of their lives. Even Obama did it and look what he turned out to be.

Further interesting info is revealed when the types of drugs most commonly used are discussed. It seems the most popular drugs in primary school are paint thinners and cough medicine (kudos for our creative youngsters). Our secondary school teens of course like ketamine and cannabis. And our uni boys and girls enjoy weed as well, plus XTC. To put matters into perspective: 47% of Grade 12 students in the U.S. have experience with drugs, mostly of the ’softer’ kind. Regarding hard drugs, well, apparently 16.2% of ALL adults in the U.S. have used cocaine at least once. We still have a long way to go Hong Kong.