Some Heroin Users Are Not Addicts

A study undertaken by a Harvard psychologist indicates that many people may intermittently take heroin without becoming addicted.

Douglas H. Powell, chief of Psychology at the University Health Services, authored a pilot study of occasional heroin users (OHUs) and found that "it seems possible for a number of youths from different backgrounds, family patterns and educational abilities to use heroin occasionally without becoming addicted."

Financed by Ford Foundation

The study, financed by a grant from the Ford Foundation's Drug Abuse Council, recruited 12 OHUs from the Boston-Cambridge area who had no history of addiction, but who had been taking heroin intermittently for at least three years.

The report indicates that OHUs, sometimes called "chippers," "are not significantly different from the so-called street people of their age." Powell found that OHUs are more anxious and tense than young people in college and that they have a less-developed sense of well-being.

The report emphasizes that chippers are uncommitted to anything and show little concern for the future. They plan their lives only in terms of hours, days and weeks, and do not have a clear sense of where they were headed.

Though heroin attracted the OHUs for several different reasons, two critical factors prevented them from becoming addicts. The OHU's friends and environments were straight, and the OHUs shared the tendency to watch their heroin use very carefully, stopping heroin use when they felt they were getting "hooked."

Episodic Use

Powell said yesterday that he felt the most interested observation was that OHU's use of heroin was "episodic" and did not stem from an inner need.

"There was no pattern to the chippers' use of heroin," he said. "It was largely a function of chance rather than planning."

Powell said that the significance of this finding is that it seems that heroin use by chippers depends on the availability of the drug and therefore "the less heroin there is around, the less people will use it."

Powell's study points to the ready availability of heroin as a reason for the increased use of the drug among adolescents in recent years. Heroin can be easily obtained in both poor and affluent neighborhoods in the Northeast, Powell said.