HIGH RISK PROSPECTIVE STUDY OF DRUG USE AND CRIME

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DESCRIPTION: (Applicant's Abstract) Based upon our compelling findings that children who began their schooling within an inner city community vary dramatically in their pathways to adulthood, we are requesting additional support to better understand the role that economic disadvantage has for the etiology and maintenance of drug use and other problem outcomes. There is a dearth of convincing scientific evidence that people who are poor, use more drugs than those who are not poor. Yet policy makers and social scientists often describe grave problems of drug use within America's inner cities. The risk factors for drug use as shown in the first stage of our work includes individual, family, and neighborhood characteristics. The focus will now be on those factors that are associated with poverty and disadvantage, such as receipt of welfare, living below the poverty level, having difficulty paying one's bills, neighborhood level poverty, and relative deprivation. We will also examine the neighborhood context in terms of the relationship between economic disadvantage and drug use. The population for the initial funded grant consisted of an epidemiologically defined cohort of 1242 African American adults first studied in 19676, when they were in first grade in Woodlawn, an inner city neighborhood in Chicago. In addition, we will also include in our analyses a Baltimore birth cohort originally enrolled at birth in the early 1960s and most recently followed in 1992-1994, the 1992 National Household Survey of Drug Abuse, and the National Co-Morbidity Survey with data collected in 1990-92. These three additional data sets will allow for the comparison of findings from the Woodlawn Study with three other data sets, all will data collected on young adults of approximately the same age at approximately the same time; one of the data sets includes a Baltimore sample quite similar demographically to the Woodlawn survey, and one represents a subset aged 31-34 of a national population to be used as a comparison group. The addition of the Baltimore longitudinal data will allow us to consider the generalizability of the Woodlawn findings; the two national data sets will provide benchmark to place the two community samples within a national context. This research is designed to understand early developmental patterns leading to drug use and other problem outcomes. Although adult drug use and crime behavior are important problems among the Woodlawn cohort, many of those who began school within this disadvantaged community have reached adulthood without these problems.