Introduction and Aims: Adolescent drinking has decreased in numerous high‐income countries in the 2000s, and how to explain this downward trend is far from clear. Focussing on the decline in drinking to intoxication among youth in Norway, we examined the following potential explanatory factors: family/home‐based and peer‐oriented leisure‐time activities, perceived parental drinking, drug substitution, school conscientiousness and delinquency.Design and Methods: Data stemmed from cross‐sectional surveys of adolescents aged 13–17 years in the four largest cities in Norway in 2002 (n = 1204) and in 2013/2015 (n = 31 441). We examined the extent to which the decline in intoxication prevalence was attributable to the possible explanatory variables using logistic regression analysis.Results: The proportion reporting any past‐year intoxication episodes dropped markedly from 2002 (41%) to 2013/2015 (22%). Family/home‐oriented leisure‐time activities and school conscientiousness increased, whereas hanging out with friends in the evening and delinquent behaviours decreased. These factors together accounted for 43% of this decline. Decrease in going out with friends was the most important factor. We found no empirical support for assumptions that perceived parental drinking or drug substitution had contributed to the decrease in drinking to intoxication.Discussion and Conclusions: Since the millennium shift, urban adolescents in Norway have become more home‐, family‐ and school‐oriented, and less involved in unsupervised socialising with peers and delinquency. These changes may have contributed to some of the reduction in the prevalence of intoxication in this population group.

Ecstasy users have been described as “ordinary people” with “normal lives” in recent literature, but little empirical evidence exists to support this portrayal. One may assume, however, that such a rosy portrayal is more likely to fit individuals who consume drugs that are more commonly used (e.g., cannabis). With this in mind, we have explored characteristics of different categories of drug users by analyzing data from a general population study of young people in Norway (n = 2,761). Respondents were assessed three times over a period of seven years (mean age at time 3 = 21.6 years). Results showed that ecstasy users, cannabis users, and users of “traditional” hard drugs were all relatively unremarkable with respect to socio-economic characteristics. On the other hand, they all tended to have a less favorable family background than nonusers of drugs, and their rates of past and present legal substance use, mental health problems, and antisocial behavior were also much higher. Individuals who included ecstasy in their drug-taking repertoire had a somewhat more deviant profile than other drug users, indicating that their public image of being ordinary and well adjusted is highly overstated. This image did not fit “pure” cannabis users very well either.

The eleven-item Drug Use Disorder Identification Test (DUDIT) is a recommended screening tool, but its length may impede its use in prison intake assessments. Hence, we examined the performance of eight brief DUDIT screeners against the full DUDIT, employing a sample of male inmates. Our study included male participants in the Norwegian Offender Mental Health and Addiction (NorMA) study who reported pre-prison drug use and who had been incarcerated three months or less (n = 251). We performed receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) analyses and estimated the area under the curve (AUROC) to assess the performance of DUDIT-C (four drug consumption items) and five-item versions that consisted of DUDIT-C and one additional item. Almost all (95%) screened positive on the full DUDIT (scores ≥6) and 35% had scores that were indicative of drug dependence (scores ≥25). The DUDIT-C performed very well in detecting likely dependence (AUROC=0.950), but some of the five-item versions performed significantly better. Of these, the DUDIT-C + item 5 (craving) had the highest AUROC (0.097). A cut-point of ≥9 on the DUDIT-C and ≥11 on the DUDIT-C + item 5 identified virtually all (98% and 97%, respectively) cases of likely dependence, with a specificity of 73% and 83%, respectively. At these cut-points, the occurrence of false positives was modest (15% and 10%, respectively) and only 4-5% were false negatives. The DUDIT-C was highly effective in detecting likely drug dependence (according to the full DUDIT), but some combinations of DUDIT-C and one additional item performed better.

Objective:We assessed how heavy episodic drinking (HED) in adolescence (Time 1) was related to hazardous drinking as well as symptoms of alcohol problems and dependence in early adulthood (Time 2)....

Background/Aims: Alcohol problems in the prison population are understudied, underdetected, and undertreated. Our aims were to identify subgroups of inmates whose pre-prison drinking behavior indicated a high need for alcohol-related interventions, to assess the prevalence of concurrent alcohol and drug problems, and to compare dual-dependent inmates and those who were alcohol-dependent alone with respect to the severity of their drinking problems. Methods: Data stemmed from the nationwide Norwegian Offender Mental Health and Addiction (NorMA) study. Both male (n = 1,356) and female (n = 90) inmates took part in the study, representing about 40% of the prison population in Norway at the time of the data collection (2013–2014). Pre-prison substance use problems were assessed using the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) and the Drug Use Disorders Identification Test (DUDIT). Results: A majority (55%) had an AUDIT positive screen (score ≥8), which is indicative of alcohol problems of some severity, and 18% were possible alcohol-dependent (score ≥20). A positive screen was associated with younger age, lower education, violent offending, driving while intoxicated (DWI), and previous criminal convictions. Two-thirds (68%) of those who screened positive on the AUDIT had also a DUDIT positive screen (score ≥6), and a similar overlap between possible alcohol dependence and possible drug dependence (score ≥25) was observed. Inmates with possible dual dependence (12% of all) had higher mean scores on the AUDIT than those with possible alcohol dependence only (7% of all). Conclusions: More than half of the prisoners in Norway had AUDIT scores that indicated they could benefit from alcohol-related interventions, and the prevalence was elevated in younger, less educated groups of previously convicted DWI, and violent offenders. Alcohol problems were most often combined with drug problems, and possible dual dependence was associated with particularly severe drinking problems.