Psychoactive Drugs Are Misused Most In Young People by Pooja Shete on February 4, 2021 at 5:02 PM
An analysis of national survey responses suggests that nearly a third of US teens and young adults prescribed a psychoactive drug misuse that drug. The likelihood of misusing these drugs increases with age. The findings indicate that stimulants and tranquillizers were more likely to be misused than opioids.
The study is published in the online journal
Family Medicine & Community Health.
In the US, drug overdose is a leading cause of unintentional death and most of the cases involve opioid painkillers, but not all.
Data available on the misuse of other prescription psychoactive drugs are few and each year more than 1 in 3 teens and young adults in the US are prescribed one of these drugs. The researchers used the responses of 110,556 US 12-25 year olds who took part in the 2015-2018 National Survey of Drug Use and Health Sampling.