ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews systematically some of the more salient findings from a decade of research on the epidemiology of alcohol and drug abuse among adolescents. It shows that persons characterized as "daily" users of marijuana are better typed as multiple drug users. In the drug abuse field, measurement problems are much more formidable because of the lack of regulation, the variety of substances that fall under the rubric of illicit drugs, and the generally low prevalence rates for most of these drugs. From a measurement perspective then, the study of the use of illicit drugs is still in its infancy compared to the study of alcohol use. The Monitoring the Future surveys, sponsored by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, have been conducted annually since 1975 among a nationally representative sample of high school seniors. The several models which attempt to describe the stages of drug involvement are built, for the most part, on the unidimensionality assumption of Guttman scaling.
