Do I smell pot? A trial of an alternative paradigm of olfactory cue-reactance to marijuana

Abstract

Marijuana, the most commonly used illicit drug among college students, remains the most cited reason for entering treatment for substance abuse and dependency (Johnston, L.D., O’Malley, P.M., Bachman, J.G., & Schulenberg, J.E. (2009). Monitoring the future: National survey results on drug use, 1975–2008. Volume II: College students and adults aged 19–50. Bethesda, MD: National Institute on Drug Abuse). Current models now include craving as a potential indicator of drug problems (Goldstein, R.Z., & Volkow, N.D. (2002). Drug addiction and its underlying neurobiological basis: Neuroimaging evidence for the involvement of the frontal cortex. American Journal of Psychiatry, 159, 1642–1652). Memory-expectancy and cue-reactance manipulations are increasingly common in the study of craving. Such manipulations rely on the use of relevant cues to prime thoughts associated with the substance of interest. Nevertheless, manipulations involving marijuana primes remain limited; most only using visual and over-stereotyped cues and are tested using samples that already meet criteria for problematic use. The current experiment tested an olfactory manipulation for priming thoughts of marijuana using a sample of 85 college students that represent an array of past marijuana use. Two 2 × 3 χ2 tests revealed that participants who smelled cannabis reported a higher proportion of primed words associated with marijuana than those who smelled a control scent. Logistic regression revealed that history of cannabis use did not alter the magnitude of this priming effect. Results support the use of this study's novel olfactory cue as an appropriate manipulation for the study of marijuana priming effects within college-aged samples.