The Global Distribution and Epidemiology of Psychoactive Substance Use and Injection Drug Use Among Street-Involved Children and Youth: A Meta-Analysis

Abstract

Background: Globally, street-involved children and youth (SICY) who work and live on/of the streets are at higher risk of increased psychoactive substances and injecting drug use. Objectives: The present study aimed to identify the prevalence, distribution, sociodemographic factors, and risk-taking behaviors associated with psychoactive substances and injecting drug use among SICY. Methods: Studies in English published from December 1 1985 to July 1 2022, were searched for on PubMed, Scopus, Cochrane, and Web of Science to identify primary studies on psychoactive substances and injecting drug use among SICY. The pooled-prevalence estimates were obtained using a robust fixed-effects model. Results: The most commonly reported life-time and current psychoactive substance was tobacco followed by cannabis, LSD/ecstasy, cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and injection drug use. The results showed that life-time and current prevalence of methamphetamine and cannabis use, as well as life-time prevalence of cocaine, LSD/ecstasy, heroin, tobacco, and injecting drug use increased as age rose while current prevalence of cocaine and tobacco use decreased as age rose. SICY who were male, homeless, had parents who had died, had history of substance use among family members or best friends, had experienced violence, had casual sex partners, had a history of working in the sex trade, and had unprotected sex were all related to psychoactive substance use and injecting drug use. Conclusions: Research examining this population suffers from lack of studies, therefore, improving the knowledge for interventions aimed at reducing risk behaviors, particularly those related to the transmission of sexually transmitted infections such as HIV is of great importance.

Keywords:

• Street-involved children and youth
• psychoactive substances
• injection drug use
• violence
• casual sex partner
• sex trade
• unprotected sex

Authors’ contributions

BA—Conceived the study BA—collected all data. BA and RM—analyzed and interpreted the data. BA—drafted the manuscript. MDG and BA contributed to the revised article and were responsible for all final editing. All authors commented on the drafts of the manuscript and approved the final copy of the article for submission.

Availability of data and materials

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Declaration of interest

The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.

Ethics approval and consent to participate

The present study was an analysis of preexisting literature and did not use human subjects.

Notes

1 A number of studies have reported LSD/ecstasy as a combined category so this grouping has been retained for the present study’s meta-analysis

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.