The latest youth survey from Åland offers a cautiously encouraging picture: illicit drug use remains rare and fewer upper-secondary students say they have been offered drugs. Yet alcohol continues to occupy a familiar place in teenage life on the autonomous Finnish islands — making prevention, rather than complacency, the real story.
A small island community, measured carefully
Åland’s annual youth survey is unusually valuable because it does not reduce young people to a single headline. Conducted by ÅSUB, Åland’s statistical and research office, together with Folkhälsan på Åland, the 2026 study received 1,426 responses from pupils in lower secondary school and students in the first two years of upper secondary education. It looks across alcohol, illicit drugs, nicotine, gambling and digital habits — but also asks whether young people feel well, enjoy school and have someone to talk to. That wider frame matters on an archipelago where public-health challenges are visible at close range, and where prevention depends as much on family, schools and community life as on statistics.
Drug exposure is moving in the right direction
The clearest positive movement concerns exposure to illicit drugs. Fewer than three per cent of respondents reported having used drugs, broadly unchanged from the previous year. Among upper-secondary students, the proportion who said they had been offered drugs fell from 18 per cent in 2025 to 14 per cent in 2026; the share who knew, or believed they knew, someone able to sell drugs also declined, from 35 per cent to 28 per cent. These are not figures for triumphalism: availability and curiosity have not disappeared, and the survey does not suggest that Åland is somehow immune to the pressures facing young people elsewhere in the Nordic region. Still, lower exposure is meaningful. It suggests that the island’s long-running, co-ordinated prevention work — bringing together schools, health services, youth work and civil society — has something solid to build on.
Alcohol is still the more ordinary risk
Alcohol tells a less encouraging story precisely because it remains comparatively normal. Nearly 30 per cent of lower-secondary pupils said they had tried alcohol, a slight rise on 2025 and a return to roughly the 2024 level. Among upper-secondary students, 61 per cent had consumed alcohol and 46 per cent said they had been intoxicated — figures broadly unchanged in recent years. The concern is not merely consumption but its setting: five per cent of all young people surveyed said they had at some point driven a moped, moped car or tractor while intoxicated, while more than one in ten had travelled with an intoxicated driver. In an island landscape where scooters and mopeds are an everyday route to independence, that is a very practical safety issue rather than an abstract health warning.
There is also a reason for cautious optimism
The picture is not one of a generation in crisis. Almost three quarters of respondents said that they felt well or very well, while 78 per cent of lower-secondary pupils and 80 per cent of upper-secondary students said they enjoyed school. Fifty-seven per cent took part in organised leisure activities, from sport and music to theatre and voluntary fire brigades, and almost four in five spent at least an hour exercising on a typical day. Among upper-secondary students who had been intoxicated, monthly heavy episodic drinking also fell by around five percentage points compared with 2025. These are important protective factors: connection, meaningful activity, trusted adults and a sense of belonging are not a substitute for prevention policy, but they make it more likely to work.
Prevention needs to follow the evidence
Åland’s 2025–2028 policy programme on alcohol, drugs, doping, tobacco and gambling sets an explicit ambition: to raise the age at which young people first use alcohol and other substances, and ultimately to ensure that nobody under 18 uses them. Its approach recognises that information alone is insufficient. It combines age-limit enforcement and reduced availability with school-based prevention, support for parents, early help for young people at risk and alcohol-free environments where children and teenagers can feel safe. The 2026 findings reinforce that logic. Drug exposure may be easing, but alcohol and nicotine remain embedded in the social landscape; prevention must therefore be patient, consistent and rooted in everyday adult responsibility.
The lesson from Åland
The most promising element of the survey may be its refusal to paint young islanders as either a success story or a problem to be solved. Åland has evidence of resilience — most young people report wellbeing, school satisfaction and active lives — alongside specific risks that need attention. Fewer drug offers and less frequent heavy drinking among some students are real gains. The task now is to turn those gains into a broader cultural shift, so that alcohol ceases to be treated as the inevitable rite of passage that it still appears to be for many teenagers.
Suggested Online Sources: ÅSUB’s 2026 Youth Survey; Nya Åland’s report on the findings; Folkhälsan på Åland’s preventive ANDTS work; Åland’s 2025–2028 ANDTS policy programme
