Eight out of 10 Evanston Township High School students do not smoke cigarettes. Seven out of 10 choose not to drink with their friends.

But these substance-free students still believe they’re in the minority.

“They exaggerate – they think everyone’s doing it,” Donald Zeigler, vice chairman of the Evanston Community Health Advisory Board, said at the Friday kick-off of “Strength in Numbers,” a campaign to promote “non-use” of alcohol and cigarettes by ETHS students.

According to Healthy People 2010, a set of health objectives for Americans by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, research shows teens are more likely to start smoking or drinking because they believe these are normal habits for people their age.

The Strength in Numbers campaign, a collaboration between ETHS and the Evanston Substance Abuse Prevention Council, is funded in large part by a state grant for prevention. The program will use advertising techniques to promote healthy behavior by countering perceptions that smoking and drinking are “cool.”

The “increase non-use” message was carefully chosen to focus on the positive, campaign planners say, and it represents a shift in thinking. Zeigler said he believes students focus on the prevalence of drug use instead of realizing that if 17 percent of ETHS students smoke, 83 percent do not. The campaign’s message will be direct so students don’t have to do the math, Zeigler said.

Posters that went up Monday give ETHS students the “non-use” statistics from their school. Strength in Numbers hopes to show ETHS students that the group they think they’re fitting in with by using drugs doesn’t exist.

The message also will be marketed to parents, whom students ranked second only to school as their most widely used and reliable source of information on drugs and alcohol, according to the program’s survey of ETHS students.

“Students really do listen to their parents,” said Sara Christensen, committee chairwoman and the prevention specialist at PEER Services, 906 Davis St, which stands for Prevention, Education, Evaluation, Recovery.

Tobacco and alcohol were targeted for the project as the first drugs most teens try. Among 12- to 17-year-olds, those who drank alcohol and smoked cigarettes at least once in the past month were 30 times more likely than their substance-free peers to smoke marijuana, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Tobacco and alcohol also were targeted as sources of addiction throughout teens’ lives.

About 40 percent of those who start drinking at age 14 or younger develop alcohol dependence at some point in their lives, according to national statistics given in the Strength in Numbers presentation.

Five percent of high school smokers thought they still would be smoking in five years. Seven to nine years later, 75 percent of these same high schoolers still were smoking.

An audience member questioned the reliability of the survey data, but project coordinators assured him their survey to measure drug use and non-use was accurate.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign designed the survey and was chosen for its reputation for reliability, Christensen said.

Project coordinators polled the student body, basing their results on 2,010 of ETHS’s 3,048 students. A sample of only 500 would be considered representative in statistics.

Students were given envelopes in which to seal their responses to ensure confidentiality, Christensen said.

Although ETHS’s reports are better than the national average, they are consistent with the national majority of high school students who do not use any alcohol or tobacco products.

“The friends that I choose to hang out with now are not a smoking and drinking crowd,” said ETHS senior Tamara Burns, who was part of a focus group for the campaign. “My mom raised me to have more respect for myself and my body.”

A study by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration showed that for every dollar spent on substance abuse prevention, society saves $30. That $30 comes from private costs such as rising health insurance premiums for the variety of health issues drug users experience, more hidden costs such as absenteeism from employee substance abuse, and public costs such as crime, the study found.

Strength in Numbers sees itself as an ongoing project with concrete goals. Planners would like to see a 3 percent to 7 percent increase in reported non-use after the first year. By the end of the fifth year, they would like a 20 percent increase in reported non-use. Christensen calls these “conservative numbers” and hopes for better.

Promotional materials will change monthly to keep students’ attention, Christensen said.