Cocaine Use, by Age Group (Tables 4.1 to 4.4)

Prevalence of cocaine use varied considerably across age groups. Lifetime cocaine use was higher among 26 to 34 year olds by more than a 2:1 margin over any other age group, while rates of past year and current use were similar for young adults aged 18 to 25 and middle adults in the 26 to 34 age group. Among 12 to 17 year olds, past year cocaine use increased from 1.4% in 1996 to 2.2% in 1997, and crack use increased from 0.4% to 0.8% (OAS, 1998c, Table 7). Most of the increase occurred among 16 and 17 year olds whose past year rate of cocaine use increased from 3% in 1996 to 5% in 1997. The increase also seemed to be predominantly among white adolescents whose past year prevalence doubled from 1.2% in 1994 to 2.5% in 1997 (OAS, 1996a, Table 4.2).9 The rate for black adolescents remained relatively constant from 1994 to 1997.

Table 4.4 gives a more refined picture of cocaine use by age. Lifetime prevalence of cocaine use appeared to increase with each age group from 12 to 13 years of age to 35 to 39 years of age, then to decrease gradually. The steepest age gradients in the prevalence of lifetime, past year, and past month cocaine use occur in the teenage years. In particular, only about 0.5% of youths aged 12 or 13 had used cocaine in the past year. By ages 14 and 15, the prevalence nearly doubled (0.9%), and by ages 16 and 17, the prevalence quadrupled to 5%. This phenomenon reflects an age-of-onset effect: First-time use of cocaine occurs most often at these ages. The 1997 Monitoring the Future study reported a similar phenomenon for any illicit drug use other than marijuana (which includes cocaine use), with a proportional increase between 8th and 10th grade students for past year use (12% vs. 18%, respectively) and current use (6% vs. 9%, respectively) (Johnston et al., 1998a; NCADI, 1998).

9 In the interest of readability for this report, "white" is used to indicate "white, non-Hispanic," and "black" to indicate "black, non-Hispanic."

This page was last updated on December 30, 2008.