Drug Use and Delinquency: Shared and Unshared Risk Factors in African American and Puerto Rican Adolescents

The relation between psychological characteristics and drug use was investigated in subjects studied longitudinally, from preschool through age 18. Adolescents who had engaged in some drug experimentation (primarily with marijuana) were the best-adjusted in the sample. Adolescents who used drugs frequently were maladjusted, showing a distinct personality syndrome marked by interpersonal alienation, poor impulse control, and manifest emotional distress. Adolescents who, by age 18, had never experimented with any drug were relatively anxious, emotionally constricted, and lacking in social skills. Psychological differences between frequent drug users, experimenters, and abstainers could be traced to the earliest years of childhood and related to the quality of parenting received. The findings indicate that (a) problem drug use is a symptom, not a cause, of personal and social maladjustment, and (b) the meaning of drug use can be understood only in the context of an individual's personality structure and developmental history. It is suggested that current efforts at drug prevention are misguided to the extent that they focus on symptoms, rather than on the psychological syndrome underlying drug abuse.

Two longitudinal surveys based on random samples of high school students in New York State indicate four stages in the sequence of involvement with drugs: beer or wine, or both; cigarettes or hard liquor; marihuana; and other illicit drugs. The legal drugs are necessary intermediates between nonuse and marihuana. Whereas 27 percent of high school students who smoke and drink progress to marihuana within a 5- to 6-month follow-up period, only 2 percent of those who have not used any legal substance do so. Marihuana, in turn, is a crucial step on the way to other illicit drugs. While 26 percent of marihuana users progress to LSD, amphetamines, or heroin, only 1 percent of nondrug marihuana users and 4 percent of legal drug users do so. This sequence is found in each of the 4 years in high school and in the year after graduation. The reverse sequence holds for regression in drug use.