Variation in drug injection frequency among out-of-treatment drug users in a national sample

This article analyzes data on drug injection frequency in a sample of more than 13,000 out-of-treatment drug injectors interviewed across 21 U.S. cities and Puerto Rico through the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Cooperative Agreement for AIDS Community-Based Outreach/Intervention Research Program. The goals of the article are to present findings on injection frequency and to predict variation in terms of a set of variables suggested by previous research, including location, ethnicity, gender, age, educational attainment, years since first use of alcohol and marijuana, income, living arrangement, homelessness, drugs injected, and duration of injection across drugs. Three models were tested. Significant intersite differences were identified in injection frequency, although most of the other predictor variables we tested accounted for little of the variance. Ethnicity and drugs injected, however, were found to be significant. Taken together, location, ethnicity, and type of drug injected provide a configuration that differentiated and (for the variables available for the analysis) best predicted injection frequency. The public health implications of these findings are presented.