May 15, 2017
New Jersey has the highest percentage – 30.70 percent – of teens who have been offered, sold or given an illegal drug on school property, according to a new study released Monday.
Jersey’s rate is 2.6 times higher than in Iowa – 11.90 percent – the state with the lowest rate of teens exposed to drugs on school property, according to WalletHub.
Despite that, New Jersey was ranked just the 35th worst jurisdiction overall, just a bit behind Pennsylvania, which came in at No. 32.
Tiny Delaware is one of the places with the worst drug problems in the country, coming in at No. 4 among the top five: Washington, D.C.; Vermont; Colorado; Delaware; and Rhode Island.
The U.S. is quite simply addicted to using drugs:
• The number of people who admit to ever using an illicit drug rose from 1979 (31.3 percent) to 2015 (48.8 percent), according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
• Annual overdose deaths have more than tripled from 2000 (17,415) to 2015 (52,404).
• And over 11 times more people were in prisons and jails for drug offenses in 2015 (469,545) than in 1980 (40,900), according to The Sentencing Project.
To read the entire WalletHub study, click here.
