Drug Use During and After High School: Results of a National Longitudinal Study

Findings indicate that the amount of nonaddictive illegal drug use has been much less for American young people than reports in the media had suggested during the period in question, and that the relationships between nonaddictive drug use and delinquency (as well as between drug use and academic performance) is far less serious than commonly has been assumed by the public. Clearly there has been an important generational change in this area, with an increasing proportion of American youth being interested in, and tolerant of, the use of psychoactive drugs. However, as of mid 1970 the vast majority of the age group studied were still cautious about illegal drugs and not deeply involved in them; and many of those who were involved made important distinctions between the different drugs and the different degrees of usage. In fact, from the perspective of health and public safety one of the most important findings about levels of drug use may be the degree to which American young people are continuing to adhere to certain traditional practices, namely, the consumption of alcohol and cigarettes on a major scale. Even though the best available evidence suggests that absolute levels of illicit drug use may be quite a bit higher now than was observed for the high school class of 1969, the authors expect that most of the relationships observed in this study could be extrapolated to more recent cohorts of high school and college students. Among those relationships are that between drug use and delinquency, and that between drug use and academic performance. Still a third is the relationship of certain drugs to membership in the counter culture. A developmental trend, which also would be expected to hold up in the present, is the substantial increase in the use of both licit and illicit drugs which occurs in the year following high school graduation, particularly in the sectors which are most age segregated, such as military service and college. Finally, note should be made again of the intriguing finding that there exists a general orientation toward psychoactive substances, both licit and illicit, which can explain some of the variance in all of the drug attitude and drug behavior variables included here, and which causes them all to be positively associated to some degree. Discovering the causes of this general orientation, which has been replicated in a number of other studies, remains a serious challenge to researchers in the field.