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If you believe that drug use is declining, you are very naive. What is happening is that teenagers are becoming wise to the stupid polls. One of the high schools in my county (a rural area of WA State) numbered in the highest percentage of drug use in the country and the public school where I live (a border town, where almost 95% of the kids really do use drugs) was recorded as one of the lowest. Kids have just wised up to the stupid polls.

That's your anecdotal evidence against actual, empirical evidence. Certainly, demand characteristics are always an issue with surveys, and therefore always a potential confounding variable. But, even if the kids are 'wising up to the polls,' as you claim, why didn't kids 'wise up' to them in the past? What these surveys claim is that there is a difference between survey data today compared to the past -- but kids in the past, I would assume, were just as likely to be subject to the same kinds of demand characreristics in these polls. That in itself would eliminate the confound, acting as a control mechanism, that validates these findings -- if not the actual numbers, at least the difference between cohorts. In short, there is more reason to believe the meaning of the results (that there is a real difference) than there is to doubt them. So, no, I'm not naive.

Yes, you are naive. Drug use is still rising, not declining. The drugs are changing, but not declining. My youngest is a junior in college and I have friends who teach in the schools and have kids who are still in high school. Even the local Christian school that my son attended is getting worse because they are accepting kids who were kicked out of the public school to raise funds for expansion.

re: why didn't kids 'wise up'...perhaps teens have noticed a significant increase in drug testing in our country and are therefore less inclined to "share" their habits with anyone?