Nunavut youth: immersed in booze, weed, boredom

This slide, one of many shown by researchers at a March 27 community meeting in Iqaluit, shows that girls from Iqaluit and Kimmirut who participated in a recent survey on drug and alcohol use also smoke more than boys of the same age.

To be young in Nunavut often means to be stoned, drunk and bored, researchers funded by Health Canada reported March 27 at an Iqaluit community meeting.

Iqaluit and Kimmirut youth aged 11 to 20 are two to three times more likely to take drugs and drink alcohol than their peers in southern Canada, the researchers said.

Most start smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol by age 14, and nearly all youth are smoking dope and drinking by the time they turn 18.

Girls in these south Baffin communities are more likely to start marijuana use at an earlier age and end up binge drinking more often than boys.

The researchers, from Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, presented their results March 27 at a community meeting in Iqaluit. And their results are comparable to similar studies they’ve carried out in Inuit communities in Nunatsiavut and Nunavik, lead researcher Natache Brunelle said.

In Nunavut, Brunelle and her team found about one in four youth needed some kind of professional help for alcohol- and drug-related problems.

“These are big numbers,” Brunelle said.

But only a small number of youth who need help have seen counsellors about their problems.

“Most kids don’t like to talk about it,” Brunelle said.

But these at-risk youth have a hard life: they’re bullied and bully others, sell sexual favours for drugs, and engage in risky behaviours, like riding fast on all-terrain vehicles.

They told researchers they’re worried about school, money, family problems, and physical problems caused by their addictions.

For their study, the researchers and local interviewers talked to 232 students between November 2009 and March 2010. On average, youth in the study began regular drinking at age 14 and regular drug use at age 13.

One regular user of gas, glue and solvents started huffing at the age of nine.

Those early ages are troubling, Brunelle said, because early use of drugs is an indicator of addiction later in life.

By Grade 7, about one in five of the kids in the study said were already drinking over the past year. By Grade 12, all youth said they had started drinking.

And the percentage of drinkers increased with each grade.

Researchers also found that girls binge drink more than boys.

More than one in five girls (22.5 per cent) said that they’d had five or more drinks on at least three to five occasions over the past year.That’s more than double the number of boys who said they had been binge-drinking.

And marijuana is the drug of choice for youth, the researchers found.

In Grade 7 about one in three kids use marijuana. By Grade 12 eight in 10 do. More than one in 10 (12.5 per cent) smoke weed every day.

About half the youth in the study said they smoke tobacco, too. Here, there are also more girls who smoke every day than boys.

Most of those in the study reported problems caused by drug and alcohol use in the months prior to the survey.

But even in dry communities, drugs and alcohol are easy to get, researchers learned. “Kids in my grade are friends with people who are 18 and older so they can just give them the money to… get alcohol for them,” a survey participant said.

Youth said they feel forced into taking drugs by peer pressure and boredom, and “I think at first I did it because it was more fitting with older crowds….it’s kind of people you want to be like, so I just decided to do it too,” was one comment.

A second study looked at what solutions people in eight communities in Nunavik, Nunatsiavut and Nunavut suggested.

These included more treatment centres, better policing and counselling.

But none of the youth suggested culture and tradition might help them.

Asked why girls may have more problems, Brunelle suggested they may be more sensitive to trauma, more easily influenced and more vulnerable to getting on hooked on drugs and alcohol by people who give these substances to them.

The study results point to the need to develop special strategies to help girls, Brunelle said.