Criminal involvement among young male ecstasy users

Ecstasy (MDMA) use increased rapidly in the U.S. between about 1995 and 2001. Most research on the drug focused on its psychopharmacological and public health contexts. Previous research on drugs-crime linkages suggests that there may have been a concommitant rise in ecstasy-related crimes. We explore this dimension here using data from 7794 arrested men, age 16 to 25, in the 2001 Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) sample and 9764 male respondents of similar age in the 2001 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (NHSDA). Our results using a variety of bivariate and regression methods indicate that ecstasy use is less prevalent among young male arrestees than young men in general and that ecstasy use among arrestees is positively associated with various measures of drug market participation but negatively related to violent and property offenses. We recommend further investigation of ecstasy use in drug-oriented data sets and longitudinal studies to evaluate the link between ecstasy use and overall drug marketing.