Almost every teenager misusing prescription opioids is using something else too

Most youth substance use measures moved in the right direction over a decade:

And the 2019 levels:

The finding underneath

Among students currently misusing prescription opioids:

Six in ten and four in ten. Use of other substances was common — which
means the group the opioid crisis response is aimed at is, for the most part,
not a group of opioid users.

That has a direct consequence. A programme built around prescription opioids —
their risks, how they are obtained, what dependence looks like — addresses one
of two or three things a given student is doing. The report's recommendation is
correspondingly general: **evidence-based prevention policies, programmes and
practices that reduce risk factors and strengthen protective factors related to
youth substance use**, alongside opioid-crisis initiatives.

Risk factors and protective factors, rather than substances. The things that
make a sixteen-year-old more or less likely to use anything are largely the
same things.

Who

**Substance use varied by sex, race and ethnicity, grade, and sexual minority
status** — lesbian, gay or bisexual students — which is the pattern nearly
every adolescent health measure shows, and the reason a national average is
the least useful number in the report.

Adolescence is an important period of risk for substance use initiation,
which is why the survey measures both current use (past 30 days) and
lifetime use: one says what is happening now, the other says whether a
generation has started.

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, MMWR Supplements.