http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2011/11/14/high-iq-linked-to-drug-use/?hpt=hp_t2

This article is about a British study on kids with high IQs being more likely to use illegal drugs.

I thought this thread would be about snakes.

Their cutoff for "high IQ" is 107.

Isn't that most of the U.S. college population?

I was hoping for "death" myself.

That article does a terribly job of reporting the actual study. You can find the full thing, plus a file of supplementary data, on this page:
http://jech.bmj.com/content/early/recent
(at least, I can: it may be that I'm silently getting past a paywall by virtue of being at work. If so I won't distribute copies, as that would be illegal, but I'm happy to look up the answers to questions.)

At a quick read, they've got an interesting, apparently solid study that does show the effects summarised. They report data by IQ sextile (so the highest sextile is those with IQs of 130+) and it does seem to show that the likelihood of using illegal drugs goes up with IQ (even after adjusting for social class, income etc.) e.g. is higher in those with 130+ than in the next group down etc., not just that those at 107+ are more at risk than those at 93- (or whatever it was). This is interesting and potentially worrying. However, looking at the tertile data, the difference between the risk in the lowest tertile and the middle one is typically much bigger than the difference in risk between the middle and the highest tertile. IOW, assuming one were not terribly worried about the risks for an average-IQ child, one shouldn't be all that much more worried about the risks for a 130+ child.

It would, of course, be interesting to know what happens further out on "our" tail, but I don't think they have that data (you can imagine the difficulties).

You are. I get a payment request.

Thanks ColinsMum, that seems like a good way to walk the line.
So my burning question is - how many people over 130 were included?

also
How much drug use was needed to be 'drug+' documented? Personally I'd be much more upset if a child grows up to be a daily user than a less than once every 2 weeks user. I'm hoping for 'zero' by age 30, but then, I'm hoping for zero by age 30 for alcohol too, and most people don't think that's 'normal.'

How much increased was the risk of the over 130 group to the next lower group?

I wonder how good a job they did of controlling for SES. At my workplace everyone gets a drug test when they are hired, (although not routinely) but most people with my occupation never get a drug test - so I'm sensitive to the 'people with IQ under 107' are much more likely to have jobs with routine drug tests which means that Alcohol is much more favorable than Pot. (Is it still current thinking that from a medical point of view Pot and Alcohol are quite similar? It's been so long since I've followed this question!) My personal impression is that 'daily either' doesn't look good on people, although some tolerate it better than others.

I wonder if I can get funding to study how IQ correlates with Drug testing at work?

Actually I'm more curious about the difference in alcohol and drug use with ADHD plus IQ. My guess would be that the 2e folks would be at both edges, and the 'only high IQ' folks would be more in the middle.

Smiles,
Grinity

What about those with IQ over 140? 150?

My guess is that the rate of drug abuse would go UP . . .

When I saw the thread title, the first thing that came to mind was my dd3's absolute fear of BUGS!! She has even had nightmares about bugs!

That probably depends on your internal position on the War on Drugs.

I posted in another thread earlier this month about my HG nephew. He had so much potential and in his teens decided to get into drugs and barely graduated from HS b/c his priorities were so messed up. He now has a minimum wage job at Home Depot that requires drug testing.

I just meant that school would be less and less tolerable the brighter you are, so a more highly gifted student would be more likely to look to drugs for stimulation and/or oblivion.

I think that would matter more to the lower end of the intellectual spectrum than the higher, because the lower end is more often characterized by black-and-white thinking.

But what about the global thinking and sophisticated strategic concepts that are necessary to operate the War on Drugs?

I would expect a higher-IQ individual to be able to separate their opinions on drug use and the drug war as two distinct positions, which may or may not overlap. Also, I'd expect that the relationship is usually the other way around... rather than a position on the drug war informing personal choice regarding drug consumption, people's personal decisions about consumption inform their positions on the drug war.

So the below-average person goes, "Drugs bad, so war good." A higher-IQ individual might conclude that both are bad, which the below-average individual cannot help but see as a contradiction, because of black and white reasoning. Then the high-Q individual starts qualifying those as more nuanced positions, with not all types personal consumption bad, and low-Q decides high-Q is a raging addict.

And so, welcome to the modern political discourse.

Anyway, I wouldn't expect a high-Q to decide to use drugs because of moral/political objections to the war on drugs. That'd take some really tortured logic.

Just my take, anyway.

Yes, I can see that as a possible situation.

FWIW, drug use isn't what I fear most. I'm way more afraid of car accidents and a few other things.

LOL... I got rear-ended on my morning commute, and I'm pretty sore right now, so a little drug use is looking pretty attractive right now.

Well, at least he didn't take out $200,000 in loans and go to law school.

Owie. Try an ice pack too if you can get hold of one (a package of frozen food or a cold can of soda might also help).

I find that my clients generally prefer the green poultice.

Sorry for delay - life intervened.
Curiously I can't find that figure. There were 5353 people altogether in the analysis sample (i.e., once they'd excluded the people for whom they don't have all the data - and the paper did attempt to check whether the group for whom they do have all the data is representative), and they do give means and SDs for IQ score in a wide range of subgroups, all of which look kind of normal, so probably whatever you'd expect for that size sample - what would it be? Not huge.
Used in the last 12 months (at age 30).
The >130 group was between 1.1 and 1.8 times as likely to be using cannabis as the 115-130, depending on which group you look at (men, women, using IQ data from age 5, using it from age 10, with or without controlling for stuff). No very clear pattern within that except that all the ORs seem higher for the IQ-data-from-age-10 groups.
My impression is that occupational drugs tests are very rare in the UK, so I doubt that'd be a factor. They controlled for mother's and father's social class as assessed when the subjects were 5, and for subject's own: significant psychological distress (at 16), social class, monthly income, level of education (assessed at 30 years). Didn't seem to make much difference.

No, I think that's an outdated view for two reasons. First, it's now consensus, I think, that the optimal alcohol intake is not 0 (for most people - might be different if you have a strong family history of certain cancers, etc.) but I know of no reason to think there's consensus that any level of pot intake is beneficial. Second, I think the evidence that pot, even in rather moderate quantities, can precipitate schizophrenia in vulnerable individuals is now pretty strong, and quite worrying.

All my (high IQ) family have used illicit drugs - mother, father, uncles, aunts (cannabis for the most part, though my husband - who no longer uses any - has tried most things). None had addiction issues, some still, in their 60s use cannabis occasionally for recreational purposes. All those that did not have other issues (such as mental illness not related to drug use) have stable and successful careers and lives. I think there is a lot of fear around drug use that is not really supported by lived experience.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not promoting drug use and I don't mean that drug use is risk free - while I drink recreationally, I'm the black sheep in the family for not having tried much else because I'm not comfortable with the potential implications. My mother, who is mentally ill, regularly used cannabis when I was growing up with not terribly positive results. I also went to school with a guy, who I suspect was PG, who has ended up being regularly admitted to psych wards over the course of his adult life due to psychotic episodes apparently caused by his very heavy adolescent drug use - but there were other factors at play there too, including extreme family breakdown and abuse. So while I understand how detrimental it can be for vulnerable people, there is, I suspect, often more to negative outcomes than just the drug use. My understanding is that the majority of people who experiment with drugs have positive experiences, with no discernible negative outcomes.

There is a book on this that was recently published by an Australian journalist, Louise Pryor. I haven't read it, but is has been very positively received here by medical professionals and community groups for presenting a realistic look at recreational drug use:

http://www.amazon.com/Small-Book-About-Drugs-ebook/dp/B005DXOPFK

I certainly don't mean we should be forcing drugs down kids' throats, and there will be consequences for dd if I find she is using drugs before she's 18 (18 is when children come of age here), but I do thinking that panicking about them is unproductive and, largely, unnecessary. I think, much like many other risky things, kids need to be educated about the risks involved and how to handle themselves if they do get in to trouble (so many publicised young drug deaths here seem to have been as a result of kids not knowing what to do when things do go wrong, or not calling help because they don't want to get in to trouble).

What level of significance did they calculate that these results were at? Were there roughly equal numbers of subjects considered in each IQ sextile, or were they working from a sample that had a normal distribution of IQ?

It seems that with this sample size, if it was a normally distributed sample, you'd probably only have about 106 people at 98th percentile and above (over 130 IQ). That is few enough that each individual who reported in the affirmative would account for nearly a full percentage point increase in the rate of drug use for that group, and that could make a huge difference in the reported relative chances, since, IIRC, the rates of drug use they found at age 30 were in the single digits.

For the binary questions, they use the usual p<0.05 as the threshold value for reporting; many individual issues have much lower p values quoted. For the ORs mentioned in my previous post they give 95% confidence intervals (many of which are quite wide, yes, but not overlapping 1). Here's the main methodology paragraph in case it's more helpful:


The latter. (The former would be decidedly weird!)

On the last point, no: in the sample overall, at age 30 they found that 35.4% of men and 15.9% of women had used cannabis in the previous 12 months. They did indeed find lower percentages for other drugs, but cannabis is the only one for which they report results in IQ sextiles as opposed to tertiles, and that's what the ORs in my previous post refer to. Come to think of it, this may be precisely because their sample wasn't big enough to get significant sextile results for the less used drugs, as you suggest.