Age and First Experience with Psychoactive Drugs

By utilizing the Gutman Scaling technique and by plotting acquisition curves, a number of different patterns of involvement with different psychoactive drugs were discerned. A stable, sequential, and cumulative hierarchy of experience with drugs was found to be established at age 15, but different peak years exist for trying different drugs. It was also found that drug use may be cumulative for some drugs and not for others. Special emphasis has been given to discussing the research implications that have arisen from the present study.