ASSESSMENT ON THE KNOWLEDGE, ATTITUDE AND PRACTICE OF SUBSTANCE USE AMONG PREPARATORY STUDENTS OF MEKELLE.

Abstract

Background: Substance abuse has been defined by Asuni et al. as 'excessive or inappropriate use of psycho-active substance by a person; such use being considered or judged to be illegal/immoral by the culture and resulting in harm to the person or society'. Globally, the UNODC estimates that between 155 and 250 million people, or 3.5% to 5.7% of the population aged 15–64 years, had used illicit substances at least once in the previous year. Objective: The overall objective of this study was to assess the knowledge, attitude and practice of substance use among preparatory students of Mekelle. Methodology: The research design for this study was a school-based cross-sectional descriptive study. Mekelle is the capital city of Tigray, and the study unit was a stratified simple random sampling method. Mekelle has 17 Preparatory Secondary Schools of which 11 are government owned and 15 are private schools. Nine Preparatory schools within Mekelle city were selected using simple randomized sampling. A total of 257 respondents participated in this research using simple randomized sampling with a replacement of lottery method. The study period was from May to July 2017. Result: A total of 257 students participated in the study. Of this 155 (60.4%) were males and 102 (39.6%) were females. Also 141 (54.9%) were from grade 11 and 116 (45.1%) were grade 12 students. The respondents in this study ranged from the age of 15–22 years, and as expected most of the respondents were Christian followers. Conclusion: According to this study the overall knowledge of the students about substances was found to be fair (48.5%), the overall attitude of the students towards substance was negative, meaning most of the respondents did not approve substance use and also the practice of substances in the study area was poor (24%). Recommendation: It can be recommended from the study that health education information should contain all aspects about drugs so as to give comprehensive knowledge, attitude and skills for effective change.

Keywords: Substance use, drugs, illicit drugs