Smoking, Drinking, and Drug Use in Young Adulthood: The Impacts of New Freedoms and New Responsibilities

• NCJ Number: 176728
• Author(s): J G Bachman; K N Wadsworth; P M O'Malley; L D Johnston; J E Schulenberg
• Date Published: 1997
• Length: 260 pages
• Grant Number(s): R01DA01411
• Sponsoring Agency: National Institute on Drug Abuse
• Corporate Author: University of Michigan
• Sale Source: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This study examined why some young adults substantially change their patterns of smoking, drinking, or illicit drug use after graduating from high school.

Abstract

The research is based on an analysis of drug-use patterns among 33,000 young people from the nationwide Monitoring the Future project, which monitored the experiences of these youths from high school through young adulthood. Every 2 years, participants reported on their drug use, as well as their schooling, employment, military service, living arrangements, marriages, pregnancies, parenthood, and even their divorces. The study found that as young men and women left high school and moved into the new experiences of adulthood, two directions of change emerged, one involving new freedoms and the other involving new responsibilities. These kinds of role change imply two different directions of change in drug use as well. As young adults left their parents' home and experienced less parental supervision, they tended to exercise their freedom by staying out late, going to parties, and enjoying the freedom from age restrictions on alcohol and tobacco consumption. They were also freer to keep supplies of illicit drugs away from the watchful eyes of parents. Most who were nonusers of drugs in high school, however, remained nonusers in the years immediately after high school. For those who had developed patterns of drug use while still in high school (this included the majority of all youth when it came to the use of alcohol and substantial minorities for the use of cigarettes and the use of marijuana), the new freedoms accompanying the first years of adulthood provided opportunities for increasing use; this study provides ample evidence of such increases. They data also show that marriage, pregnancy, and parenthood created new responsibilities that were linked to decreases in drug use. On the whole, the findings are encouraging, as they suggest that the potentials for change and improvement during the transition to adulthood are as important as the detrimental effects of the problem behavior in adolescence. Extensive graphic and tabular data, 144 references, and appended supplementary information