HAGÅTÑA (The Guam Daily Post) — While there’s no national data regarding betel nut use, a survey conducted in 2017 showed that on Guam some people first tried chewing in middle school, according to information shared during the Pacific Islanders Partnership for Cancer Health Equity 2023 cancer symposium held Sunday.
“What we found is with Guam middle school kids lifetime and past 30-day betel nut use rates are respectively 13.6% and 6.9%,” said Francis Dalisay, who studied adolescent tobacco, e-cigarette and betel nut use.
With data on betel nut use on Guam limited, Dalisay said there’s a need to study what causes or leads youth to use betel nut, where they are obtaining the betel nut and how to prevent its use.
He said that in 2020 and into early 2021, focus groups were studied with the goal to examine and identify scenarios in which Guam youth are offered tobacco, e-cigarettes and betel nut.
The researchers found that youth exposure and use was related either to direct relational offers or to indirect contextual offers.
“Direct relational offers: These (occur) when the substance offerer has, typically, an established relationship with the participant (and) explicitly offers the substance. … Indirect contextual offers: Here no explicit offer of a drug is made, but instead the kids (find) themselves in a situation or environment where substance use is involved or used. There’s an implicit demand for them to use it,” Dalisay said.
The study found that youth who used any of the three substances were most likely a result of indirect contextual offers.
Meanwhile, Thaddeus Herzog, an associate professor in population sciences in the Pacific at the University of Hawaii Cancer Center, has conducted an extensive deep search on betel nut use across the Pacific and globally.
“It’s called betel nut because it’s often chewed with a piper betel leaf. So the leaf … is the leaf that the white powder is on top of. Betel leaf is actually from a completely different plant, like a pepper plant,” Herzog said.
According to Herzog, an estimated 600 million people worldwide chew betel nut. It is ranked as the fourth most used psychoactive substance in the world behind alcohol, tobacco and caffeine.
The mild intoxicant or stimulant is moderately addictive, said Herzog, adding that betel nut has cultural and religious significance in different parts of the world.
Betel nut chewing is known to cause oral cancer, other cancers of the head and neck region and other oral diseases.
“We found in our survey that most betel nut chewers were addicted. According to our survey items, they indicated that they were at least moderately addicted to betel nut chewing.”
“We also investigated the reasons for chewing. We found that the strongest reasons for chewing were related to the stimulative effects,” Herzog said.
His research also found that most betel nut chewers did want to quit and that many had tried to stop chewing in the past, similar to cigarette smokers.
A person prepares a mixture of betel nut and tobacco on Sunday, Nov. 5, 2023, in Tamuning.
