Research Shows Having Illegal Drugs in the Home Makes it More Likely People Will Use Them

Huh?

Researchers and the drearily uncreative folks at ScienceDirect tell us that those teens who have access to illegal drugs in the home from their parents are more likely to have tried them before those young people who do not get the drugs from their parents’ stash.

Odds ratio for using Cannabis or “Other Drugs” was about 2, meaning that people who reported having “illegal drugs easily available” in the home were twice as likely to have tried cannabis or illegal drugs compared to those who said that illegal drugs were not “easily available” in their homes as teenagers.

Overall, I was expecting to hate the article but think it’s pretty decent. But it’s incessantly annoying to read summaries of research findings, like Science Direct’s, that do not describe the magnitude of the effects nor how well known the finding is. What every summary of this should say is “the following is what everyone knew ahead of time and this is the first step in trying to sort out exactly how all the variables are associated in the populations we study.”

One thing that the summary didn’t highlight is that just being male had about the same effect size: around twice.

Table 5 Odds Ratios from Paper
Table 5 Odds Ratios from Paper

If that seems interesting to you, then you might want to read this crap:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/07/160729110923.htm

Or the abstract and paid article in this low end journal “Journal of Child & Adolescent Substance Abuse”. The journal isn’t even index by PubMed. 🙁 At least their publisher can afford a DOI subscription.

Erowid Ref 9080 or http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1067828X.2015.1103346

They keep having to move domains, but the full article is available via Sci-Hub.

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