title: The incidence of drug use and associated factors in two small towns: a community survey.
abstract: The article reports the results of a 1974 drug survey in two rural municipalities in the Pacific Northwest. Drug use in these towns was found to be similar to drug use in urban areas. It appears that towns size 2,500 to 50,000 have been absorbed into the national drug culture while only farmers and people living in very small towns still experience relatively low rates of drug use. Other findings include attitudes toward and needs met by drug use, the effect of parental drug use on perceived children's drug use, and the relationships between drug use and age, sex, and general health. In the past few years, articles have appeared describing adult drug use in the United States as a whole, or in selected urban populations. The most comprehensive study is a national survey of a representative sample of 2,552 adults completed in 1971 (1-3). Among the regional reports are studies carried out in California (4,5) and New York (6,7). What these studies have in common is the absence of data on rural or small town drug use as compared with urban drug use. A national study by Cahalan, Cisin, and Crossley (8) does analyse rural-urban differences, but only for alcohol use. No comprehensive treatment of this topic exists in the literature. The research reported in the present article represents an attempt to begin to fill in this void data on small town drug use in a rural setting.
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D001290:Attitude; D004363:Drug Utilization; D005260:Female; D006262:Health; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010287:Parent-Child Relations; D012424:Rural Population; D012737:Sex Factors; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014481:United States; D014505:Urban Population