CORONADO, CALIF. — One out of six students at a Midwestern medical school reported prior use of at least one club drug, results from a survey found.
“Physicians should be cognizant, when treating medical students, physicians, or other health care workers, that we are not excluded from substance abuse,” Dr. Alex Horowitz said in an interview after presenting the study at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry. “The same principles should be applied when assessing health care workers for substance use as when assessing the rest of the population.”
In what he said is the first study of its kind, Dr. Horowitz and his associates asked 340 students at a private Midwestern medical school to complete an anonymous survey about their use of and attitudes about club drugs. Generation I club drugs were defined as cocaine and LSD; generation II club drugs included 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (also known as ecstasy), methamphetamine, gamma hydroxybutyrate (GHB), Rohypnol, ketamine, and dextromethorphan.
Nearly half (46%) of the respondents were first-year students; 34% were second-year; and 20% were third-year.
Overall prevalence of lifetime club drug use was 17%, with ecstasy and cocaine the agents of choice (12% and 6%, respectively), said Dr. Horowitz, psychiatric unit chief of the methadone treatment program at Bellevue Hospital Center, New York. The prevalence of medical students' lifetime ecstasy use was similar to that of their peers in the general population, as reported in the National Institute on Drug Abuse's 2004 “Monitoring the Future” survey.
Compared with students aged 21–25 years, those aged 26 and older were more likely to have used the generation I drugs (cocaine, 16% vs. 4%, respectively; LSD, 14% vs. 2%). However, no relationship was found between age and use of generation II club drugs in general.
Students who reported never using club drugs perceived regular cocaine use as posing the greatest risk to health (89%), followed by ecstasy (72%). For students who reported lifetime use of at least one club drug, the perceived risk of using cocaine and ecstasy regularly was significantly lower (75% and 58%, respectively). Club drug use did not differ between men and women, but women rated them as generally more harmful than did men.
A greater number of students thought it would be necessary to revoke the licenses of physicians who were currently using generation I club drugs than those who were using generation II club drugs (27% vs. 20%, respectively).
Dr. Horowitz of the department of psychiatry at New York University acknowledged the self-reported nature of the study is a limitation. Another is that the data were collected in a classroom setting, which means participants were limited to students more likely to attend class. However, the survey was given in a class considered mandatory.