What are Differences between Non-injecting and Injecting Drug Addicts?

Background: this study aims to identify the differences betweeninjecting drug users (idus) and non?idus, with regard tosome potential factors. this could be useful to design effectiveinterventions for harm reduction, which is one of the priorityareas in reducing the burden of addiction.methods: sixty cases and 60 controls participated in thispair?matched case?control study, which was conducted in tehran.the cases were idus who were asked to introduce two friends; oneidu and the other non?idu as the paired control. in addition todemographic variables, onset age of cigarette smoking, droppingout of school, imprisonment, history of being sexually abused formoney, and family history of using illegal drugs were obtainedfrom the cases and controls via an interview. pair odds ratio (or)was estimated through mcnemar and conditional multivariablelogistic regression analysis.results: eighty?three % of the idus and 92% the controls weremale. the mean for onset age of cigarette smoking was 16 in thecases and 20 in the controls, which was significantly differentbetween cases and controls (p < 0.001).in the multivariate analysis, dropping out from school wassignificantly different between cases and controls (or=4.2295% ci: 2.23 – 14.0). imprisonment was more frequent in iduscompared to non?idus (or=3.70 95% ci: 1.09 – 11.08). thecases had more sexual relationship for earning money comparedto the controls (or=3.14 95% ci: 1.24 – 13.70). onset age ofcigarette smoking was significantly (p < 0.001) sooner in the iduscompared to the non?idus (15.9 and 20.1 years, respectively).idus reported 5.5 times more that non?idus of having an addictin their family (p value=0.04).conclusion: the finding of this study can be useful in identifyingthe persons who are at risk of idu. therefore, people who involvewith risk factors recognized in this study should be triggered forharm reduction prevention strategies.