New Hampshire and Vermont have among the highest rates of illicit drug use in the nation – according to responses the states’ residents gave on a federal survey.

They led much larger states in the 2002 survey by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration, which surveyed 68,000 people nationally.

Health officials in both states said they weren’t surprised.

“What we are seeing is an enabling environment particularly for young people. There is a presumption that marijuana is not harmful,” said Vermont Health Commissioner Paul Jarris. He said the most common reason people between 12 and 18 age seek drug treatment is for marijuana abuse. “We are seeing kids lives ruined.”

Alice Bruning, chief of Prevention Services for New Hampshire’s Department of Health and Human Services, said the drug’s easy availability, combined with a low perception of its risks, have established an environment of tolerance in New England when it comes to marijuana.

“You have a lot of local supply. It’s easy to grow in the kind of rural forested communities that we have,” Bruning said. “We don’t have that general attitude that we don’t want people to smoke marijuana … (but) if we asked someone in the street, do you think it’s OK for kids to shoot heroin?’ They’d say, Are you crazy?”‘

The survey, released earlier this week puts both states in rare company. New Hampshire and Vermont rank in the top 20 percent of states with the highest frequency of drug use by people age 12 and over.

The survey estimated drug use rates for nine substances, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin, hallucinogens, inhalants, stimulants and sedatives.

Bruning said demographics play a big role in Northern New England’s high drug use rates, where Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont rank in the top fifth of states with the most first-time marijuana users between the ages of 18 and 25.

In the same age group, the survey reported 30 percent of New Hampshire residents, 29 percent of Vermont residents and 23 percent of Maine residents used marijuana in the month before the survey, compared to less than 7 percent nationwide.

Bruning linked marijuana use to binge drinking, which studies show to be highest at small, private colleges in the Northeast – campuses full of well-off students with the time and the freedom to do what they want.

“It looks as if it’s the same kind of population that’s binge drinking,” she said.

“More and more students are coming to college with either their behaviors already well under way or their expectations for what they’re going to have at college well under way.”

But so-called “soft drugs” like marijuana are not the only problem for largely white, middle-class New Hampshire and Vermont.

Heroin use is up in both states. Jarris said Colombian drug dealers, operating through gangs in Massachusetts, were specifically targeting Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.

And Vermont is one of 14 states that does not monitor prescription drugs that can be diverted to illegal use. When police crack down on one drug, such as heroin, illegal use of drugs like Oxycontin will increase, Jarris said.

He said Vermont officials were working to educate people not to use illegal drugs, to treat people with drug problems and to crack down on the drug trade.

“We’ve had an environment where we have often chosen to believe this is an out-of-state problem,” Jarris said. “We have years of work to do to.”