I’m currently attending the annual meeting of the College on Problems of Drug Dependence (CPDD) in Reno, NV.
Since there’s so much drug addiction research being presented here, I figured I would post a daily update with some of the things I found most interesting. There’s absolutely no way for me to see all the presentations I’m interested in, so what I get to see is what you get to hear about.
One of the interesting presentations today had to do with a broad study of drug use patterns among adults who are not drug addicts. The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Alabama (who ran the CARDIA study), looked at the drug use patterns of adults enrolled in a Coronary Artery Risk study over many years. It’s important to note that drug use in this case does not include smoking, drinking alcohol, or marijuana use. The researchers also didn’t distinguish between use of different drugs for the purpose of this study.
The researchers found 4 common drug use patterns:
- No current use – Over 80% of the participants reported no use within a month of any of the follow-up dates. More than half of those people said they’d used at least one drug at some point in their life, but their use was not common enough to ever fall within a month of their check-ups.
- Early use, low frequency – About 12% of people used drugs with some frequency at an early age but then reduced their use throughout the follow-up period.
- Persistent use, low – These users continued to use drugs throughout the study period, but their use did not escalate.
- Early, persistent, use – These users started early, used a lot, and though their use tapered off, it remained higher than any other group throughout the study.
I personally think that these findings are encouraging. They show that at least within this population, only a small proportion of individuals engage in what we would consider chronic, dangerous, drug use.
I reported similar findings regarding relapse in alcoholics in another post a while back (see here), and I’m glad that statistical techniques are being used to uncover larger patterns of drug use and abuse in a more general population.
More addiction research to come. There’s almost too much to report!