Welcome to the home page of Team Risky Business. We are an undergraduate research team at the University of Maryland. Our focus is the the relationship between early alcohol and/or tobacco use and later hard drug use.
Youth and young adult drug use is on the rise once more. The gateway drug hypothesis is a well-known theory that ascribes hard drug use as a consequence of earlier use of "gateway" substances such as alcohol and tobacco. Using available data from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, our research aims to answer the following question: Does early tobacco and/or alcohol use lead to a reported increase in use of harder drugs? We believe that early tobacco and/or alcohol use will not be seen to increase hard drug use.
Questions? Concerns? Contact Mark Limsam at mlimsam@umd.edu