News / Health & Wellness
High IQ, High Drug Risk
Experts are still trying to make sense of a new study that shows those with high IQs are two to three times more likely to take illegal drugs.
"It's counterintuitive," says lead author James White of the Center for the Development and Evaluation of Complex Interventions for Public Health Improvement at Cardiff University in Wales. "It's not what we thought we would find."
The research was part of a much larger study that has spanned decades. The findings are based on interviews with some 7,900 British people born in early April 1970. Researchers measured the participants IQs at ages 5 and 10, then followed up with them at ages 16 and 30, asking about symptoms of psychological distress and drug use as part of a larger survey.
Researchers found that by age 30, approximately 35 percent of men and 16 percent of women said they had smoked marijuana at least once in the previous year. Over that same time period, 9 percent of men and 4 percent of women said they had taken cocaine. Previous-year drug users tended to have scored higher on IQ tests than non-users.
The IQ effect was a big factor in women, with ultra-smart members of the fairer sex proving to be three times more likely to have tried drugs and high-IQ men twice as likely. And these results held even when researchers controlled for factors like socioeconomic status and psychological distress, which are also correlated with rates of drug use.
So why might smarter kids be more likely to try drugs? "People with high IQs are more likely to score high on personality scales of openness to experience," says White. "They may be more willing to experiment and seek out novel experiences."
Another factor could be that the messages used to attempt to deter teens from drug use — particularly during the 1980s in the UK when the study group was in adolescence — weren't exactly known for the subtlety of their reasoning, so they may not have targeted the smarter group well.
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