Objective: In recent years cohort studies have examined childhood attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as a risk factor for substance use disorders (SUDs) in adolescence and young adulthood. The long-term risk is estimated for development of alcohol, cannabis, combined alcohol and psychoactive SUDs, combined SUDs (nonalcohol), and…

Travelers are a migratory subgroup of homeless youth who may be especially prone to engaging in risky behavior. This study compared the substance use and sexual behavior of young homeless travelers and non-travelers to evaluate the extent and possible sources of travelers' increased risk. Data came from face-to-face interviews with 419 homeless…

Adolescent substance use is a serious problem often invoking negative reactions. The current study extends the literature in this area. A total of 425 college students read one of five vignettes, each of which described an adolescent who used marijuana, hard liquor, or drank an occasional beer (control) and who had received or not received…

The Adolescent Responses to Alcohol and Drug Offers Scale (ARADOS) is a self-report questionnaire designed to assess a respondent's anticipated emotional reactions and intended use of cognitive-behavioral refusal skills in response to an offer of alcohol or other drug. A sample of 267 students enrolled in the 11th and 12th grades of four public…

Previous research on pubertal timing has either evaluated contextual predictors of early puberty or negative adjustment outcomes associated with off-time development, especially early maturation. In this study, we integrated these 2 lines of research by evaluating the moderating influence of early childhood household risk on associations between…

Objective: To examine whether students' school engagement, relationships with teachers, educational aspirations and involvement in fights at school are associated with various measures of subsequent substance use. Methods: Data were drawn from the Belfast Youth Development Study (n = 2968). Multivariate logistic models examined associations…

Using seven waves of data, collected twice a year from the 8th through the 11th grades in a low-resource community in Cape Town, South Africa, we aimed to describe the developmental trends in three specific leisure experiences (leisure boredom, new leisure interests, and healthy leisure) and substance use (cigarettes, alcohol, and marijuana)…

This study explored the relationship between trajectories of affective self-regulation skills during secondary school and young adult substance use in a large multiethnic, urban sample (N = 995). During secondary school, participants completed a measure of cognitive and behavioral skills used to control negative, unpleasant emotions or perceived…

Endocannabinoids are critically involved in the extinction of fear memory. Here we examined the effects of repeated cannabinoid administration on the extinction of fear memory in rats and on inhibitory synaptic transmission in medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) slices. Rats were treated with the CB1 receptor agonist WIN55212-2 (WIN 10 mg/kg, i.p.)…

Aims: To investigate the links between the visibility of cannabis use in school (measured by teachers' reports of students being under the influence of cannabis on school premises), the proportion of cannabis users in the class, perceived availability of cannabis, as well as adolescent cannabis use. Methods: A multilevel regression model was…

We report on research--both quantitative and qualitative--conducted to explore perceptions of prototypes of marijuana users, as well as the extent to which self-prototype congruence predicted marijuana use intention. Results of a survey of undergraduates (N = 139) showed that prototypes of users and non-users differed in terms of key attributes,…

This article examines why Southeast Asian American adolescents and emerging adults in two urban settings prefer to use "blunts," or hollowed-out cigars filled with marijuana, over other methods of drug intake. Rationales for preferring blunts were both instrumental and social. Blunts allowed users to more easily share marijuana, the preferred drug…

Background: Progressive myelination during adolescence implicates an increased vulnerability to neurotoxic substances and enduring neurocognitive consequences. This study examined the cognitive manifestations of altered white matter microstructure in chronic marijuana and alcohol-using (MJ + ALC) adolescents. Methods: Thirty-six MJ + ALC…

This article presents abstracts from the 2011 AMERSA National Meeting. It includes 2011 best abstracts on research, programmatic, and curricular presentations.

Few after-school programs target alcohol and other drug (AOD) use because it is difficult to encourage a diverse group of youth to voluntarily attend. The current study describes CHOICE, a voluntary after-school program which targeted AOD use among middle school students. Over 4,000 students across eight schools completed surveys and 15%…