Addiction Treatment Experience among a Cohort of Street-Involved Youths and Young Adults

Abstract

Very little is known about the accessibility and potential barriers to addiction treatment among street youths and young adults. We sought to examine the prevalence and correlates of enrollment in addiction treatment among a cohort of street-involved youths and young adults in Vancouver, Canada. Street-involved youths and young adults who use illicit drugs were enrolled in a prospective cohort study known as the At Risk Youth Study (ARYS). We examined the prevalence of addiction treatment experience and identified the factors associated with this outcome using multivariate logistic regression. Among 478 participants, 243 (50.8%) had previously been enrolled in some form of addiction treatment program. In multivariate analysis, history of overdose, previous incarceration, crack use, cocaine use, and history of injection drug use were positively and independently associated with enrollment in addiction treatment. These findings may assist health authorities in identifying and assisting youths who may have barriers to accessing treatment, and further suggest that efforts may be needed to scale up addiction treatment programming for high-risk youths and young adults.

KEYWORDS:

• drug treatment
• homeless
• initiation
• injection drug use
• youth

The authors would like to thank the ARYS participants for volunteering their time to participate in the study, as well as current and past ARYS investigators and staff. We would particularly like to thank Deborah Graham, Tricia Collingham, Leslie Rae, Caitlin Johnston, Steve Kain, and Calvin Lai for their research and administrative assistance. The ARYS cohort is supported by the US National Institutes of Health (RO1 DA11591) and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (HHP-67262 and RAA-79918). Thomas Kerr and Brandon D. L. Marshall are supported by the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

Notes

^a Denotes activities in the previous six months.

^b Denotes lifetime history.

^a Refers to lifetime experiences.

^b Refers to any route of consumption (i.e., sniffing, snorting, smoking, or injecting).

^a Refers to lifetime experiences.

^b Refers to any route of consumption (i.e., sniffing, snorting, smoking, or injecting).