A study by researchers at The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health shows that cocaine use has decreased among Americans with college degrees in the last 20 years, while remaining constant among those who did not finish high school.
Researchers compared trends in cocaine use using data from the 1979-2002 National Survey on Drug Use and Health on adults aged 19-50 years. Survey participants were categorized as non-high school graduates, high school graduates or college graduates and as either recent-onset or persistent cocaine users. Dramatic decreases in cocaine use were witnessed in the high school and college graduates after 1990, but found that persistent remained relatively unchanged among survey participants who did not finish high school.