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Continuity and Discontinuity in Illicit Drug Use: Patterns and Antecedents

Drug research has tended to focus on initiation and progressions of use. In this article we employ event history analysis to test a social learning model to identify factors associated with both the onset and discontinuity of drug use. Eight waves of the National Youth Survey (NYS), a panel study of a national probability sample of youth in the United States, provide fourteen years (1976–1989) of drug use information for 1,172 respondents aged eleven through thirty. Results include the following: once initiation has occurred, drug use is maintained for an extended time; demographic characteristics have very little effect on either initiation or desistance of drug use; variables representing social learning theory are more important in accounting for initiation than discontinuity of drug use; and life events such as marriage and becoming a parent increase the odds of discontinuing drug use.