Cocaine Use, by Adult Educational Attainment and Current Employment (Tables 4.1 to 4.3)

An interesting pattern emerged when cocaine prevalence was assessed by education and current employment. (As noted in Chapter 1, youths aged 12 to 17 were excluded from analyses using adult education or employment status.) Young adults aged 18 to 25 without a college degree had higher lifetime use than did college graduates in the same age groups. Overall, past year use was lower among adults with a college degree than among adults with less education. Given that the causes of these associations are not clear from the results alone, and factors correlated with education (e.g., income) may be strongly influential, the results suggest important issues for future research (Flewelling et al., 1992).

Unemployed adults used cocaine at higher rates than did adults in any other employment classification. Nearly 21% of unemployed adults reported that they had used cocaine at least once in their lives (as did almost 30% of the unemployed who were aged 26 to 34), 5% had used it in the past year, and 2% were currently using cocaine. For those aged 26 to 34, current cocaine use was significantly more likely among the unemployed (4%) than among those employed full-time (0.6%) and those in the "other" category (0.7%).

This page was last updated on December 30, 2008.