Toward a Causal Model of Drug Use

Abstract

Drug use remains a serious concern in neighborhoods and at all levels of government. Formulating drug policy requires sound information regarding the indicators of drug use and its consequences. To date, efforts to integrate drug use measures as a means to predict drug use trends have been minimal. This research describes a statistical modeling procedure that attempted to demonstrate the association between drug use in the justice and health systems to determine if drug use in the criminal justice system could forecast drug use in the larger community. Results of the path analysis suggested that integration of indicators was not useful for determining future drug use due to the weak associations among variables.