The association between sniffing inhalants and injecting drugs

There is evidence that the use of inhalants might prove to be a modifiable risk factor for intravenous (IV) drug use, or possibly an important vulnerability marker. However, this evidence has come from studies using samples of convenience, such as a mixture of psychiatric patients, felons, and their relatives. If there is a link between these two different forms of drug-using behaviors, then a statistical association should be found in epidemiologic studies with rigorous sampling procedures--even after statistical adjustment for plausible confounding variables such as sex, age, socioeconomic status, and the use of drugs such as marijuana. To probe this suspected causal association, we analyzed epidemiologic data from the 1990 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse sponsored by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The population for this survey consisted of all household residents aged 12 years and older in the conterminous United States, with respondents selected by probability sampling. A total of 9,259 respondents completed the confidential self-report interview conducted by trained interviewers; 192 persons reported a history of injecting drugs for nonmedical reasons (e.g., to get high), and 9,067 reported never injecting drugs. As hypothesized, inhalant use was found to be associated with injecting drugs (relative odds [RO] = 11.8). After adjustment for sex, age, race, socioeconomic status, and use of marijuana, inhalant users still were 5.35 times more likely than nonusers to have injected drugs (P < .001).(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)