Titre : | The road to ruin? Sequences of initiation into drug use and offending by young people in Britain |
Auteurs : | S. PUDNEY |
Type de document : | Rapport |
Editeur : | London : Home Office, 2002 |
Format : | 42 p. / tabl. |
Note générale : |
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Langues: | Anglais |
Discipline : | EPI (Epidémiologie / Epidemiology) |
Mots-clés : |
Thésaurus géographique ROYAUME-UNIThésaurus mots-clés INITIATION ; ENQUETE ; DELINQUANCE ; MILIEU SOCIOCULTUREL ; TYPE D'USAGE ; MODELE STATISTIQUE ; JEUNE ; FACTEUR DE RISQUE ; CANNABIS ; THEORIE DE L'ESCALADE ; CLASSIFICATION |
Résumé : | This is a study of the occurrence and timing of young peoples first use of various types of illicit drug and their first experience of various types of offending, including truancy. Its aim is to investigate the gateway effect - the hypothesis that use of soft drugs leads to a higher future risk of hard drug use and crime. The study makes use of information from the 1998/99 Youth Lifestyles Survey (YLS), which yields a set of around 3,900 interviews in which young people make a confidential report of their own experience of drug use and offending. They do this, unobserved by any other individual, by responding to questions generated automatically on the screen of a laptop computer. On the surface, the YLS data seem broadly consistent with some variants of the gateway theory, in the sense that the age of onset for most soft drugs is less than the age of onset for most hard drugs. For example, the average age of first use of glue/solvents and cannabis are 14.1 and 16.6 years respectively, compared with 17.5 and 20.2 years for heroin and cocaine. However, there are anomalies: for example ecstasy has an average age of onset of 18.9 years compared to 17.5 years for heroin. There is much less evidence of a gateway effect for drugs into crime. The average age of onset for truancy and crime are 13.8 and 14.5 years respectively, compared with 16.2 for drugs generally and 19.9 years for hard drugs. Thus crime tends to precede drug use rather than vice versa. These links are investigated at the individual level, allowing for the influence of gender, ethnicity, family background, location, age and the prevalence of drug culture in society at large. Superficially, this more detailed analysis still suggests a pattern of responses roughly consistent with the gateway hypothesis. [...] My interpretation of the results of this study is that true gateway effects are probably very small and that the association between soft and hard drugs found in survey data is largely the result of our inability to observe all the personal characteristics underlying individual drug use. From this viewpoint, the decision to reclassify cannabis seems unlikely to have damaging future consequences. |
Domaine : | Drogues illicites / Illicit drugs |
Refs biblio. : | 24 |
Affiliation : | Royaume-Uni. United Kingdom. |
Centre Emetteur : | 13 OFDT |
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