NCJ Number
227782
Journal
American Indian and Alaska Native Mental Health Research Volume: 5 Issue: 1 Dated: 1992 Pages: 1-12
Date Published
1992
Length
12 pages
Annotation
As the introductory article for this volume - which provides a comprehensive analysis of drug and alcohol use among American Indian adolescents - trends are reported for drug use by reservation-based Indian youth from monitoring since 1975.
Abstract
Trends in overall drug use among Indian and non-Indian youth have followed similar patterns, increasing from 1975 to the early 1980s, and then declining for the most-used drugs since them. At every point in the monitoring, more reservation Indian youth have been involved with drugs than were non-Indian youth. Rates of cocaine and hallucinogen use by Indian youth increased until 1990. The decline in overall drug use has been largely due to the significant number of moderate users who have stopped using drugs; however, there has been no decrease in the proportion of high-risk users, which has remained between 17 percent and 20 percent since 1980. This suggests that societal changes and substance-abuse prevention efforts are modifying the behaviors of casual drug users, but not the drug-using behaviors of heavy drug users. For this longitudinal survey of reservation Indian youth, each year researchers select five to seven tribes that are geographically and culturally representative of Indian youth across the country. Reports on drug-use prevalence rates represent aggregations across a 2- or 3-year period, in order to reduce sampling bias. Once a school agrees to cooperate, all students in the 7th-12th grades are administered the self-report survey by the classroom teachers. This strategy necessarily fails to obtain information from school dropouts, so any conclusions drawn from the data must be restricted to Indian youth who remain in school. Researchers are in the early stages of a project designed to obtain data on drug and alcohol patterns among Indian school dropouts. Preliminary data should be available within the next year. 2 tables, 2 figures, and 18 references