Journal Article
Sexual Minority Disparities in Opioid Misuse, Perceived Heroin Risk and Heroin Access Among a National Sample of US Adults
Jun 12, 2019
Differences in Substance Use Disparities Across Age Groups in a National Cross-Sectional Survey of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Adults
Published in: LGBT Health, Volume 6, Number 2, (2019). doi: 10.1089/lgbt.2018.0125
Posted on RAND.org on February 12, 2019
Read More
Access further information on this document at LGBT HealthThis article was published outside of RAND. The full text of the article can be found at the link above.
Purpose
Lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) adults have elevated rates of substance use (SU) relative to heterosexual adults, yet the extent to which these disparities vary across age groups is unknown. Using national survey data, we test for age group differences in lifetime and recent SU disparities among LGB adults.
Methods
Using data on 67,354 adults (including 4868 LGB adults) from the 2015 and 2016 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), we examined LGB disparities for measures of lifetime and recent use of cigarettes, marijuana, and illicit drugs. Analyses were stratified by age groups (18–25, 26–34, and 35–49 years) and compared lesbian/gay (L/G) and bisexual adults, respectively, with heterosexual adults of the same gender and age group.
Results
Using data on 67,354 adults (including 4868 LGB adults) from the 2015 to 2016 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), we examined LGB disparities in lifetime and recent use of cigarettes, marijuana, and illicit drugs. Analyses were stratified by age groups (18–25, 26–34, and 35–49 years) and compared lesbian/gay (L/G) and bisexual adults, respectively, with heterosexual adults of the same gender and age group.
Conclusion
Contrary to hypotheses of decreased minority stress among more recent generations of LGB individuals, we found that SU disparities were not systematically smaller in younger age groups. Rather, disparities exhibited distinct trends across age groups. As NSDUH data are cross-sectional, differences by age group may reflect the influence of both age-varying developmental factors as well as time-varying social and contextual factors.
Access further information on this document at LGBT Health
This article was published outside of RAND. The full text of the article can be found at the link above.
Related Products
Research conducted by
This report is part of the RAND Corporation external publication series. Many RAND studies are published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals, as chapters in commercial books, or as documents published by other organizations.
The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.