Gender-based differences in abstention and desistance from drug use among American Indian adolescents.

Informed by the social control theoretical perspective, this study intends to identify the factors more likely to differentiate American Indian (AI) adolescents who never used illicit drugs (abstainers) and those who used drugs in the past but did not report recent drug usage (desisters) from their peers who reported lifetime and recent drug usage (persisters). This secondary analysis is based on data from a multi-site study conducted between 2009 and 2013. It is based on a gender-balanced sample (N = 3,380) of AI adolescents (50.