Abstract
Constraint theory (Hammersley, 2014) offers a novel way of understanding addiction as a lack of cognitive, behavioural, and social constraints on substance use. Here, cannabis constraints were studied in a large online opportunity sample: N = 302; 205 men, 97 women. Age ranged from 14 to 60 years (mean = 25, SD = 8.0). Most participants were from UK or North America. Participants completed a questionnaire assessing 15 cannabis constraints and standard self-report frequency measures of drug use. Factor analysis of the constraint questionnaire found 15 factors, similar to those proposed theoretically. These factors could discriminate well between past and current users and heavy and light users. The best discriminator was concerns about the possibility of becoming addicted; the less concerned the heavier was use, although those who actually felt addicted were more concerned than others. Past users also constrained due to using legal highs instead, concerns about illegality, and using only when others used. Light users constrained due to availability and cost issues, as well as unpleasant effects. These findings suggest that there is utility in constraint theory and that heavy use occurs due to a relative lack of constraints.
Highlights
brain disease model of addiction (BDMA) models have known weaknesses, but it remains tenaciously influential, perhaps in part because a coherent alternative paradigm is lacking
A BDMA model of nicotine addiction would have to predict that most or all of this decline was due to people not starting to smoke in the first place, so that their neuropsychopharmacology could not be altered by nicotine, but a pseudocohort analysis of the same data shows that as each cohort aged a higher proportion became nonsmokers [12], for as constraints increased, more people stopped
Factor analysis found that in this sample cannabis constraints were structured but not identically, to the theoretical structure proposed by Hammersley [9]
Summary
Another 21 cases were removed due to extreme scores and unreliable data, so the final data set included 302 participants. Preliminary data analysis comparing participants from the UK with those from the rest of the world found some significant differences. In the UK, 43.3% of the sample were female, whereas only 29.5% were in the rest of the world (chi (1df ) 4.695, p < 0.05), but place of residence did not differ and age did not differ by the t test. Looking at reported days of use in the past 12 months, UK participants were significantly heavier substance users than those from the rest of the world, by t tests reporting significantly more frequent use of alcohol, amphetamines, cannabis, cocaine, crack cocaine, ketamine, nitrous oxide, poppers, and tobacco. Origin (UK or rest of world) was included in the logistic regression analyses below, in case this mediated constraints
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