The Road to Ruin? Sequences of initiation to drug use and offending by young people in Britain

The routes by which young people develop offending behaviour are very varied and strongly influenced by family background. A good understanding of the temporal sequences of first experiences of illicit drug use and other offending behaviour is needed before any plausible attempt can be made to investigate causal "gateway" effects. In this paper we develop and apply a statistical method for analysing the behavioural sequences observed in the 1998 Youth Lifestyles Survey. Gateway effects are found to be small after controlling for observable and unobservable characteristics.