ABSTRACT
Background: The use of drugs and substance abuse by teenagers is a major health concern globally .At this transitional point, secondary school students are the most vulnerable and are susceptible to risks associated with lack of knowledge of substance abuse. Therefore, the present study was undertaken to assess the knowledge and attitude of substance of abuse among male secondary school students in Benin City.
Methods: A cross-sectional descriptive study was carried out among male secondary school students .Questionnaires were self-administered, filled and retrieved from the respondents. All data collected were entered into Excel spreadsheet and sorted for corrections and then analyzed using SPSS Version 23 for descriptive statistics .In stat Graph pad was used for inferential statistics at p-value less than 0.05.
Results: Of the 401respondents (64.4%) were aged 15 years and above, 206(51.7%) from nuclear family had previous knowledge of substance abuse, 184(45.8%) got the information about substance abuse from media and 199(49.6%) said that availability of the substance and 204(50.9%) environmental influence were the factors that contributed to substance abuse respectively. Two hundred and eighty five 285(71.1%) strongly agreed that secondary school curriculum should be designed to provide basic knowledge of substance abuse and 232(57.9%) that adverts and enlightenment programs on the dangers of substance abuse should be made public.
Conclusion: In this study, male secondary school students had good knowledge, attitude regarding substance abuse and the possible ways of prevention of substance abuse.
KEYWORDS: Attitude, Knowledge , secondary school students, substance abuse.
