Experimental Substance Use

Developmental Phase

Substance use early in life has been related to a plethora of negative outcomes, and the desire to prevent substance use among adolescents and young adults has led to the development of large-scale antidrug interventions. Interventions aimed at reducing substance use among adolescents generally propose a linear relationship between substance use and maladjustment, such that greater levels of substance use are related to greater levels of undesirable outcomes. Such proposals advocate abstinence as the primary means to avoid negative outcomes. This understanding is reflected in the "lust say no" movement created during the Reagan administration and has been widely propagated by abstinence-oriented organizations. However, despite considerable efforts on the part of abstinence advocates, the majority of adolescents and young adults in the United States use substances for the purpose of intoxication at some point. Moreover, the majority of these young substance users do not experience substantial negative outcomes. This finding is incongruent with a proposed linear relationship between level of substance use and [Page 390]negative outcomes, which predicts that even low levels of substance use will result in proportionate levels of negative outcomes. This apparent incongruence has led researchers to expand taxonomies of substance users to include a category labeled experimental users. Experimental substance users are characterized by relatively infrequent substance use and by a relative absence of use-related negative outcomes.

The boundaries of experimental substance use have not been consistently defined, and the construct has been criticized for insufficient specificity. Nonetheless, the category is generally composed of individuals for whom substance use is limited to fewer than three substances, most often including marijuana and alcohol, and whose frequency of use is limited to once per month or less. Several studies have compared substance experimenters to abstainers and habitual users. An early study of this sort produced the controversial finding that experimenters were characterized by generally better psychological functioning than were abstainers or habitual users. According to that study, whereas habitual substance users were under-controlled, socially alienated, and emotionally distressed, substance abstainers were overcontrolled, anxious, and socially unskilled. In contrast, experimenters appeared to find a happy medium; they were neither excessively controlled nor excessively impulsive. Subsequent studies have challenged these findings, and evidence for superior psychological adaptation among experimenters, relative to abstainers, is scarce. However, most studies report that experimenters are generally more similar to abstainers than to habitual users. That is, they generally exhibit relatively low levels of psychopathology and other negative outcomes. There is evidence that the impact of experimentation may vary according to contextual factors such as age and community norms, such that experimentation among older adolescents and young adults in communities where such experimentation is relatively normative may be particularly innocuous.

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