The 2007 ESPAD Report. Substance use among students in 35 European Countries

This is the report from the fourth data collection of the European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs (ESPAD). In it data on more than 100,000 European students are presented in a large number of diagrams, maps and tables. Independent researchers in 35 European countries have collaborated on planning, methodological discussions, data collections and reporting of national results. This is the first ESPAD report to be based on a common database, administrated by ESPAD database manager Thoroddur Bjarnason, to which all participating countries sent their national datasets. The first ESPAD report, with data from 1995, included information from 26 countries, while this fourth report contains results from 35 countries. With the addition of five countries which gathered data in 2008, ESPAD is now established in 40 countries and covers most of the European continent. Over the years ESPAD has become an increasingly important source of information on young people's substance use. The ESPAD project was initiated in 1993 by the Swedish Council for Information on Alcohol and Other Drugs (CAN) as a follow up of a test of a European school survey questionnaire funded by the Pompidou Group at the Council of Europe in a pilot study in 1986-88, which concluded that the validity and reliability of the questionnaire were high. In the light of this experience and the Swedish expertise in school surveys, CAN started the collaborative project in contacting researchers in a large number of European countries who were invited to a first meeting at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. The meeting was hosted and supported by the Pompidou Group who also suggested names of many of the participants. The cooperation has continued since then and the Pompidou Group has funded the participation of researchers from the Central and Eastern Europe in the annual Project meetings and some Regional seminars. ESPAD also has an established contact with the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) in Lisbon. The cooperation has deepened during later years and has included support for data analysis and reporting. EMCDDA has also contributed to the production of this report and is assuring the multilingual dissemination of ESPAD results.