"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 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.
At age 30, about 35% of men and 16% of women said they had smoked marijuana at least once in the previous year; over the same time period, 9% of men and 4% 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 larger in women: women in the top third of the IQ range at age 5 were more than twice as likely to have taken marijuana or cocaine by age 30, compared with those scoring in the bottom third. The men with the highest IQs were nearly 50% more likely to have taken amphetamines and 65% more likely to have taken ecstasy, compared to those with lower scores.
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."
White is a research associate at the Center for Development and Evaluation of Complex Interventions for Public Health Improvement at Cardiff University, Wales.
The research has been mixed on how a high childhood IQ affects behavior in adulthood, White says.
"Previous studies have found high childhood IQ is associated with mostly healthy behaviors in adult life, such as having a healthy diet, being physically active, and not smoking," he says. "However, other studies have found high childhood IQ is linked to excess alcohol intake and alcohol dependency in adult life."
Kids With High IQs
In the study, women with high IQ scores at age 5 were more than twice as likely to have used marijuana and cocaine by age 30 than those with lower IQs at age 5.
Men with high IQ scores at age 5 were about 50% more likely to have used speed (amphetamines), 65% more likely to have used ecstasy, and 57% more likely to have used multiple illicit drugs by age 30, compared with those who did not perform as well on IQ tests at age 5.
The findings held when IQ was measured at age 10.
Parents' social status, psychological distress during adolescence, and their adult socioeconomic status did not affect risk of illicit drug use.
The study was not designed to determine how often participants used illicit drugs. More study is needed before researchers can draw any conclusions on how to keep brainy kids from using illicit drugs in the future, White says.
Bruce Goldman,director of substance abuse services at the Zucker Hillside Hospital of the North Shore-LIJ Health System in Glen Oaks, N.Y., says the message to parents of honor roll students is clear.
"Don't be lulled by your kid's good academic performance to think that they are not experimenting with drugs," he tells WebMD. "It is commonplace with peers and it is naive to think that because you have a good, smart kid that they will not be curious."
In fact, they may even be more curious and more apt to seek stimulation than other children, he says. "These kids may be more prone to want to find things out for themselves.
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