Climbing the Drug Staircase: A Bayesian Analysis of the Initiation of Hard Drug Use

Anne Line Bretteville-Jensen and Liana Jacobi ()
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Liana Jacobi: University of Melbourne

No 3879, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Empirical studies have found that cannabis commonly precedes consumption of drugs like amphetamine, ecstasy, cocaine and heroin. As a result a causal linkage between cannabis and subsequent hard drug use has been hypothesized. Despite mixed empirical evidence and a limited understanding of possible transmission mechanisms, the causal gateway hypothesis has been influential in formulating a strict drug policy in many western countries. Individual differences in proneness and accessibility, however, provide alternative, non-causal explanations for the observed "staircase" pattern and yield potentially different policy implications. We propose a Bayesian estimation and predictive framework to analyze the effects and relative importance of previous cannabis use, proneness and accessibility factors on hard drug initiation and to explore potential policy implications, using data from a unique recent survey of young adults in Norway. Motivated by the gateway transmission channels proposed in the literature, our model allows for a constant and a heterogeneous effect of previous cannabis use on hard drug initiation and, also, a more flexible correlation pattern for the unobservables. We find that proneness, accessibility and previous cannabis use contribute to the observed higher drug use pattern among cannabis users. The latter has the largest effect and is driven by various transmission channels.

Keywords: accessibility; Bayesian prior-posterior analysis; Bayesian predictive analysis; cannabis gateway; cannabis use; hard drug use; Markov Chain Monte Carlo; policy; proneness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C11 C35 D12 I19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2008-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ecm and nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Climbing the drug staircase: a Bayesian analysis of the initiation of hard drug use (2011)
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