Student athletes' use of substance abuse is major issue in the world of sports. Does the old theory stating that student athletes tend to stay away from drugs and alcohol hold true today? From my personal experience as a former high school athlete, I doubt this is true. With the many records of student athletes being arrested for alcohol and drug abuse, substance abuse has truly become a problem. The studies available show the correlation of usage between student athletes and the general student population? Hopefully, this information would be helpful in setting up a drug prevention program at the high school and middle school level. If so, maybe society could improve its efforts at alleviating this problem.

Many of these problems underly in the attitudes of these athletes. Of the athletes who are considered at risk of using substance abuse, seventeen percent of the athletes felt that marijuana use was an acceptable way to deal with the pressures of athletics. Instead of abstaining from use due to health risks, many refrain from drug use simply due to the fear of getting caught. Peer pressure from teammates is also indicated as a major influence as to whether or not athletes use o

Results pertaining to the frequency of alcohol use and attitudes dealing with adolescent alcohol abuse show that male high school athletes both use and abuse alcohol more frequently than non-athletes do. In addition, male non-athletes tend to abstain from alcohol use more than athletes. However, they found no difference in the frequency of alcohol consumption between female athletes and non-athletes. There was also no difference in the frequency of alcohol and between male and female athletes, but three fourths of the male athletes reported being under the influence when consuming alcohol compared to half of the

Based upon studies in search of significant differences or similarities among high school athletes and non-athletes with respect to their attitudes and drinking behavior, different results have come into place which are in the athletes favor. They found non-athletes used alcohol more and were more tolerant of others using it compared to athletes. Overall, males had a more tolerant attitude than females toward temperate and irresponsible use of alcohol. A distinct correlation was noticed between the attitudes of irresponsible drinking and who drinks the most, being the more they drank the more tolerant their attitudes were.

Based upon their reasoning, researchers looked into possible psychological factors dealing with drug use by college athletes while comparing athlete drug users to non-users. High school alcohol

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Approximate Word count = 975
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)