Drug use and knowledge of its consequences among nursing students

Abstract

Objective: to analyze the use of psychoactive substances and the knowledge of the consequences of alcohol, marijuana and cocaine use among first-year and final-year undergraduate nursing students. Method: descriptive cross-sectional study, with 141 nursing undergraduates from a public university in the state of São Paulo. Data was collected using the Questionnaire for Screening the Use of Alcohol, Tobacco and Other Substances and a questionnaire on the knowledge of the consequences of alcohol, marijuana and cocaine use. Fisher’s exact test, Pearson’s chi-square and Student’s t-test were applied for analysis. Results: alcohol and marijuana were the substances most commonly used by students. Concerning students’ knowledge of the consequences of alcohol, marijuana and cocaine use, the majority answered more than 50% of the questionnaire correctly, which is considered a good level of knowledge. Furthermore, 86.5% answered more than half of the questions correctly in relation to alcohol, 68.8% to marijuana and 76.6% to cocaine. Regarding the mean scores on the knowledge of the consequences of substance use between first-year and final-year students, there was a statistically significant difference for alcohol (p=0.026) and cocaine (p<0.001), with final-year students obtaining higher scores. Conclusion: the hypothesis that knowledge of the consequences of drug use affects drug use was confirmed only for marijuana. The results highlight the need to consider reviewing content being taught to undergraduate nursing students on psychoactive substance use.