The College Opiate User

Abstract

Interviews were conducted with 43 known opiate users who had attended college. An analysis of the information obtained suggested that these student users were more similar to their college peers than the street addict studied in hospitalized samples. They were multiple drug users who reported experimentation with many different types of drugs including a large number of hallucinogens. Most came from middle-class families with no apparent history of deviance. Unlike the street addict, these users did not have a delinquent history prior to their drug use. Nearly all of the subjects interviewed expressed plans of finishing college. One variable, the use of heroin, did appear to differentiate two groups of users. The heroin users tended to start their drug careers at an earlier age, they had used a wider assortment of different drugs, and they tended to come from slightly lower socioeconomic backgrounds than did the nonheroin users.