Patterns of drug use and sensation-seeking among adolescents in Norway

The relationship between personality and drug use was investigated by studying patterns of sensation-seeking behaviour and drug use among adolescents. A questionnaire was distributed to a sample of 1027 Norwegian senior high school students aged 16 to 19 in the greater Oslo area. The response rate was 97%. The sensation-seeking subscores showed moderate to strong association with the use of the different drugs. A canonical correlation analysis yielded 3 significant variates: in the drug use domain the first dimension correlated with the use of legal drugs and inhalants, the second with cannabis and tranquillizers and the third with tobacco. In the sensation-seeking domain the first dimension was almost synonymous with the disinhibition scale, the second with experience-seeking, and the third correlated highly negatively with thrill-, adventure- and experience-seeking. The results support the assumption that a strong link exists between sensation seeking and drug use. They further show the importance of taking different subdimensions of the sensation-seeking trait into account for prevention and treatment of drug use and abuse.