Association of school dropout with recent and past injecting drug use among African American adults.

We hypothesized that, among African American adults, starting and maintaining injecting drug use (IDU) would be associated with dropping out of high school, and that starting and stopping IDU would be associated with earning the general equivalency diploma (GED) after school dropout. Drawn from the 1991-1993 National Household Surveys on Drug Abuse (NHSDA), the nationally representative sample of African Americans consisted of 117 recent and 109 past IDUs. Conditional multiple logistic regression was used to estimate the hypothesized associations. African American high school dropouts and GED holders were 2-3 times more likely to have started and maintained IDU, as compared to high school graduates. Earning the GED was associated with starting and then stopping IDU. These findings merit further investigation because they might have significant public health implications for the prevention of IDU among African Americans.