OPINIONS OF STUDENTS AND TEACHERS ON DRUG ABUSE AMONG SENIOR SECONDARY SCHOOL IN ZARIA EDUCATION ZONE, KADUNA STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

Drug abuse and dependence producing substances are widely prevalent in African countries and have continued to increase. Substances abuse, which were originally conceived as the problem of a selected few is today becoming a problem of a sizeable proportions of the world population. A cross-sectional descriptive study design was used. Using Research advisor (2006) Sampling table, 365 students and 108 teachers were sampled using stratified random sampling technique out of 3812 and 156 study populations respectively. The instrument that was used for data collection was an adapted standardized questionnaire structured by Afuwai in 2016 who worked on drug abuse on socio-emotional behavior of secondary school students in Kaduna state, Nigeria (Afuwai, 2016). Hypothesis were tested using independent sample t-test at the .05 level of significance to determine whether there is a statistically significant difference between the means of the two unrelated groups. All statistics were done using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (IBM-SPSS version 24). The study shows that all kinds of drugs are being abused by senior secondary schools’ students in Kaduna State according to the opinions of the respondents with marijuana as the most commonly abuse drug while barbiturates (diazepam) is not a common abuse drug. An agglomeration of several factors influences the usage of drugs by senior secondary schools’ students in Zaria education Zone of Kaduna State as there were no specific factors found. The study established that female students are more predominant on abusing drugs than their male counterparts these days.