A look back at 20 years of quantifying drug use among adolescents

It was not until the end of the 1990s that France set up a system for the statistical observation of drug use behaviour in the general population. these surveys have targeted the entire French population, particularly the young people, given the public health issues involved in the early initiation of use of psychoactive substances, at the forefront of which were alcoholic beverages, cigarettes, and cannabis. Initiating a survey among adolescents on illicit behaviour was not a matter of course, but by innovating while drawing inspiration from surveys such as the Monitoring the Future (MTF) survey, carried out in the United States, and the European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs (ESPAD), conducted in other European countries, in 2000 the French Observatory of Drugs and Drug Addiction (OFDT) designed the first ESCAPAD survey among 17-year-olds, a survey whose ninth occurence will take place in 2022. Based on a few examples of emblematic results of the survey, this article reviews the specific contributions of a quantitative observation system and examines its adaptation to new methodological challenges and to changes in the field of addictology.