Drug Use at a Small Technological University in Tennessee

Abstract

This report is of 409 students at a small technological university in middle Tennessee who anonymously responded to a comprehensive drug use/nonuse questionnaire sent to them at their campus post office boxes. Users and nonusers were predictably differentiated along such psychological dimensions as anomia, authoritarianism, sensation-seeking, and self-esteem, and by such sociological factors as family background/relationships, peer support, and prior familiarity with drugs and other habituating substances. A major contribution of these data is their suggestion that the use/nonuse character of illicit drugs is essentially the same among students in a rural southern setting as has been previously demonstrated for the more urbanized regions of the northeast and far west. The present results further suggest that the students' responses were more of a male vs. female than user vs. nonuser phenomenon. Some of the implications of these two conclusions are discussed briefly.