Individual and population risk of drug use among adolescents attending an English Youth Offending Team: An epidemiological approach

This study aims to show how epidemiological methods can help service providers and policy makers to understand how risk factors for drug use differ at individual and population levels. The study sample comprised 180 young people referred to the Wolverhampton Youth Offending Team, of whom 99 (55%) had never used drugs, 35 (19%) used drugs occasionally (less than weekly) and 46 (26%) used drugs regularly. The probability of an individual's drug use was determined for each of the 64 combinations of the six risk factors in the final multivariate model. An individual with all six risk factors has a 78% chance of being a regular user, a 21% chance of being an occasional user and a 0% chance of being a non-user. These findings do not require assumptions regarding causality; they simply express the relationship between respondents' characteristics and their probability of being a drug user. Policy makers need to be able to combine this information with the relative occurrence of risk factors in the population. Fu...