Abstract
Years-of-school is negatively correlated with illicit drug use. However, educational attainment is positively correlated with IQ and negatively correlated with impulsivity, two traits that are also correlated with drug use. Thus, the negative correlation between education and drug use may reflect the correlates of schooling, not schooling itself. To help disentangle these relations we obtained measures of working memory, simple memory, IQ, disposition (impulsivity and psychiatric status), years-of-school and frequency of illicit and licit drug use in methadone clinic and community drug users. We found strong zero-order correlations between all measures, including IQ, impulsivity, years-of-school, psychiatric symptoms, and drug use. However, multiple regression analyses revealed a different picture. The significant predictors of illicit drug use were gender, involvement in a methadone clinic, and years-of-school. That is, psychiatric symptoms, impulsivity, cognition, and IQ no longer predicted illicit drug use in the multiple regression analyses. Moreover, high risk subjects (low IQ and/or high impulsivity) who spent 14 or more years in school used stimulants and opiates less than did low risk subjects who had spent <14 years in school. Smoking and drinking had a different correlational structure. IQ and years-of-school predicted whether someone ever became a smoker, whereas impulsivity predicted the frequency of drinking bouts, but years-of-school did not. Many subjects reported no use of one or more drugs, resulting in a large number of “zeroes” in the data sets. Cragg’s Double-Hurdle regression method proved the best approach for dealing with this problem. To our knowledge, this is the first report to show that years-of-school predicts lower levels of illicit drug use after controlling for IQ and impulsivity. This paper also highlights the advantages of Double-Hurdle regression methods for analyzing the correlates of drug use in community samples.
Highlights
According to journalists, public officials, and even popular song writers, kids who drop out of school early are inviting disaster
Educational attainment is correlated with IQ, psychiatric symptoms, and impulsivity [6,7,8], and each of these factors is correlated with drug use in just the way predicted by the hypothesis that they are linked to drug use by way of years spent in school
We accepted anyone who was fluent in English and said they had graduated high school or passed a General Equivalency Test for high school. (How this criterion may have influenced the results is reviewed in the Section “Discussion.”) The clinic subjects were tested at their clinics; the community subjects were tested at the Behavioral Pharmacology Research Laboratory of McLean Hospital
Summary
Public officials, and even popular song writers, kids who drop out of school early are inviting disaster Are they undermining their future earnings, but life on the streets paves the way to delinquency, drugs, and worse. Despite the widely assumed benefits of staying in school, the relationship between education and future prospects is not well understood This is true of drug use, the focus of the study described in this report. [2, 3]], and, there is evidence that early success in school protects against later drug use [4, 5] These are not mutually exclusive connections, and it is possible that educational attainment and drug use are symptomatic of one or more common factors such as IQ and/or conscientiousness, so that school functions as a proxy for its correlates and is not itself a causal factor. Educational attainment is correlated with IQ, psychiatric symptoms, and impulsivity [6,7,8], and each of these factors is correlated with drug use in just the way predicted by the hypothesis that they are linked to drug use by way of years spent in school
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