AIDS Thunder Bay study examineds drug abuse

Adults, not teenagers, are most prone to drug abuse in Thunder Bay, says one of the lead researchers of a substance abuse study.

AIDS Thunder Bay released its findings of a yearlong study titled Engaging Populations at Risk Monday. The study focused on ways to engage the hidden population of substance abusers to educate and support those individuals that inject illegal and legal drugs.
Researchers collected 363 surveys and used 295 of them in the database.

Dr. David Tranter, co-investigator for the study, said it surprised him that youth didn’t make up the bulk of drug users and that substance use didn’t decline with age. He added that the highest using group was 35-to-54.

"This is not a young persons problem it’s an older persons problem," Tranter said. "Most of them are using everyday. The types of drugs they use are prescription drugs but they are accessing them illegally. The rate of use is very, very high and doesn’t go down with age."

The study showed the most common substances used were marijuana and alcohol followed by Oxycodone and Percocets. About 27 per cent said they used a substance every day while seven per cent said couple of times a year.

Researchers conducted a snowball sampling, which means friends passed along information to other friends and so on. Tranter said they used this method to gain access to the hidden population of drug users, which is a population that would have been difficult to get to by using any other method.

Although, the study still used focus groups to gain more information.

Around 141 participants said they went to their friends for information about drugs opposed to media outlets, community workers and community events.

The Public Health Agency of Canada provided a grant of about $56,000 for the study. Tranter said with more funding, he would like to see more implications for agencies like AIDS Thunder Bay. He added that the ways to inform the public needs to be different.

Lawrence Korhonen, executive director of AIDS Thunder Bay, said they already implemented new information sharing techniques to help inform substance abusers about the agency.

"It’s hard to reach people that don’t come in of their own free-will to access our services," Korhonen said. "We discovered that people have heard about our organization, but they didn’t know where we were located."

Korhonen said Thunder Bay has one of the highest rates of hepatitis C infections, which is traditionally connected to substance abuse.