Dictionary of drug associations to heroin, benzedrine, alcohol, barbiturates and marijuana

A 3500 word dictionary of drug associations was constructed by having 20 or more opiate addicts associate words to heroin, benzedrine, alcohol, goofballs, and reefers. Broad sampling of words was attempted through selection of the 1000 most frequently used English words and a word to represent each of 1000 concepts in Roget's International Thesaurus. Sampling of the Osgood verbs of intention and Semantic Differential adjectives, meaningful and nonmeaningful nouns, words used in various free association tests, adjectives used for measurement of subjective states, drug-relevant words (23 categories), drug slang (Lingeman), and alcoholic slang (Rubington) was done to facilitate the analysis of the relationships between various linguistic categories and patterns of drug associations. It was thought that associations for a given drug would be accounted for by culturally determined verbal connections in all Ss and in part by the habit strength for a particular drug. The predominance of heroin associations in heroin addicts seems consistent with the notion that some portion of associations may be attributed to habit strength. Opiate addicts gave a large number of associations to reefers (marijuana), somewhat fewer associations for alcohol, and very few associations for goofballs (barbiturates), and benzedrine. The dictionary may be useful as a resource for the selection of words for studies of conditioning, verbal learning, perception, or individual differences; cues for possible educational objectives on drugs; evaluation of the drug relatedness of words chosen for experiments by some nondictionary criteria; and as a standard to compare the associational values of other drug users on addictive types with different presumed habit strengths.