It has been a third of a century since the Reno Gazette-Journal declared in a March 9, 1992, headline that Douglas High School students could obtain pot faster than pizza.
The ostensible reason for the story were the results of a 1992 statewide drug survey that indicated 37.4 percent of seniors in the state reported having used marijuana.
On Friday, Partnership Douglas County Director Daria Singer shared the results of the High School Behavioral Health survey with the Board of Health.
The 2024 Youth Risk Behavioral Health Survey is conducted every other year by the University of Nevada, Reno, in middle and high schools.
According to the survey, 42.2 percent of Douglas High School seniors report using an electronic vapor product. Students who’ve attained 18 years old are legal to possess nicotine devices, which have pretty thoroughly supplanted cigarettes as the delivery system of choice, with only 13.4 percent reporting they had a smoke over the past 30 days.
The survey revealed that 28 percent of high school seniors used marijuana in the last 30 days and that 4.7 percent had used nonprescribed pain medication, essentially opioids of some sort.
The survey also revealed that the most popular intoxicant among high school students remains alcohol with 52.8 percent of seniors having indicated use in the last 30 days. That’s not quite twice the marijuana use, but it’s within a couple of points.
After the revelation that some of the vape pens confiscated at Douglas High School contained marijuana and a few of those were found to contain something far more sinister, Ecstasy or fentanyl, the Partnership is conducting a Parents Night in an effort to help educate adults on the dangers of drug abuse.
The teenagers interviewed by the Gazette-Journal back in 1992 have turned 50 and their classmates have had their own children and even a few grandchildren since that day.
We doubt very much that they are any less concerned about those children than their parents were 33 years ago, or their grandparents 33 years before that.