The objective was to compare delinquent behavior and early substance use between the children in the Multimodal Treatment Study of Children With ADHD (MTA; N = 487) and those in a local normative comparison group (n = 272) at 24 and 36 months postrandomization and to test whether these outcomes were predicted by the randomly assigned treatments and subsequent self-selected prescribed medications.
Cause-and-effect relationships between medication treatment and delinquency are unclear; the absence of associations between medication treatment and substance use needs to be re-evaluated at older ages.

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