Prescription Drug Misuse Among College Students

Abstract

Prescription drug misuse (PDM) is a well-documented trend among college students, with a rising prevalence in recent years. Motivations for PDM are an important aspect of the dynamics surrounding this behavior. Using a sample of undergraduate students taken from a large southern university (N = 841), this study separates users based on their motives into typologies of instrumental, recreational, or mixed motive users and examines the differences between them using a number of social learning, social control, and strain-based risk factors while also comparing them with non-users. The results show that social learning risk factors, specifically those related to the concepts of differential association and differential reinforcement, as well as the use of other drugs, exert the greatest impact on likelihood of PDM between the motivational typologies. is an assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at Central Connecticut State University. His research interests include substance use and abuse, drug policies, problem behaviors among college students, violent crime, and criminological theory.

Heads, Seekers, Psychonauts, and One-Timers: Patterns in Stories of Psychedelic Consumption

“…Generating classifications of drug-using behavior is often done using statistical techniques, such as discriminative modeling or latent class analysis, which allows researchers to inductively create groups or classes. These studies tend to examine samples of system-involved persons, college students, or those completing national surveys (e.g., Dash, Martin, Agrawal, Lynskey, & Slutske, 2020; Green et al, 2011; Kuramoto, Bohnert, & Latkin, 2011; Patra, Fischer, Maksimowska, & Rehm, 2009; Salas-Wright, Hodges, Hai, Alsolami, & Vaughn, 2021; Watkins, 2016). Although instructive in detecting drug use behaviors among subsets of a population, quantitative studies are not well-equipped to discover some of the more dynamic, social aspects of drug use, such as the language or rhetoric used to describe and recount drug-related experiences.…”

Safety, Generous Doctors, and Enabling Parents: A Perfect Recipe of Justifications for College Students’ Nonmedical Use of Prescription Painkillers

“…Social learning and subcultural theories have been used extensively to frame college students’ opportunities and motivations for the nonmedical use of commonly prescribed prescription drugs (Akers, Krohn, Lanza-Kaduce, & Radosevich, 1979; Cutler, 2014, 2016; Durkin, Wolfe, & Clark, 2005; Ford, 2008b; Higgins, Mahoney, & Ricketts, 2009; Peralta & Steele, 2010; Schroeder & Ford, 2012; Watkins, 2016a, 2016b). In general, social learning theory focuses on how significant others such as friends and family affect the learning process and ultimately one’s decision to define deviance as desirable (Becker, 1953; Sutherland, 1947).…”

“…Studies examining college students’ NMPDU have primarily drawn on social learning theory to better explicate how various social learning mechanisms such as differential association, differential reinforcement, and imitation affect motivations for use. These works have identified both legitimate (e.g., focus, pain relief, sleep) and illegitimate (e.g., the euphoria and overall sense of well-being associated with use, to relax, to have “fun,” or out of pure curiosity) reasoning underlying misuse and abuse for a variety of prescription drugs (Cutler, 2014, 2016; Lord, Brevard, & Budman, 2011; McCabe, Cranford, & Boyd, 2006; McCabe, Cranford, Boyd, & Teter, 2007; McCabe, West, Teter, & Boyd, 2014 Mui et al, 2014; Rozenbroek & Rothstein, 2011; Watkins, 2016a). When it comes to justifications, which are also central to social learning theory, there has been far less research documenting how students neutralize their NMPDU.…”