Criminal Involvement Among Young Male Ecstasy Users

Abstract

Ecstasy (MDMA) use increased rapidly in the U.S. between about 1995 and 2001. Most research on the drug focused on its psychopharmacological and public health contexts. Previous research on drugs-crime linkages suggests that there may have been a concommitant rise in ecstasy-related crimes. We explore this dimension here using data from 7794 arrested men, age 16 to 25, in the 2001 Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) sample and 9764 male respondents of similar age in the 2001 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (NHSDA). Our results using a variety of bivariate and regression methods indicate that ecstasy use is less prevalent among young male arrestees than young men in general and that ecstasy use among arrestees is positively associated with various measures of drug market participation but negatively related to violent and property offenses. We recommend further investigation of ecstasy use in drug-oriented data sets and longitudinal studies to evaluate the link between ecstasy use and overall drug marketing.

Keywords:

• ecstasy
• MDMA
• arrestee
• ADAM
• NHSDA
• illicit drug markets

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James C. Hendrickson

James C. Hendrickson, M.A., joined NORC's Substance Abuse, Mental Health, and Criminal Justice Studies Division in the year 2000. He has at M.A. in sociology from the University of Maryland and extensive experience in the evaluation of cross-sectional data. Mr. Hendrickson has coauthored numerous publications on substance misuse and treatment improvement, and has presented on MDMA and other club drugs using the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) data and other large survey samples. In addition to his statistical programming ability, Mr. Hendrickson speaks Spanish and German and has traveled in Latin America and Europe. Hendrickson brings a wide range of interests to NORC, including the measurement of drug misuse in the criminal justice system and the epidemiology of Ecstasy, GHB, and other club drugs.

Dean R. Gerstein

Dean R. Gerstein, is Senior Vice President at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, where he founded the Washington Office and leads the Division of Substance Abuse, Mental Health, and Criminal Justice Studies. In recent years, he has been Project Director of the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring program of the National Institute of Justice, the National Archive and Analytic Center for Alcohol, Drug, and Mental Health Data (for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration—SAMHSA), the Gambling Impact and Behavior Study (for the National Gambling Impact Study Commission), Reports on Drug Use from the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (SAMHSA), and he was principal investigator for grants from the National Institutes of Health on vulnerability to drug misuse of high-risk youth, risk of HIV infection among injection drug users, linkages between health services and drug treatment services, and gambling problems among women. During the 1990s, he directed three of the largest multisite substance misuse treatment evaluations ever performed. Prior to joining NORC in 1990 he was a study director at the National Research Council, where he coauthored Alcohol and Public Policy, Treating Drug Problems, Preventing Drug Abuse, and many other publications. He has been a faculty member at UC San Diego and UCLA. He holds a B.A. from Reed College and a Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University.