It's a very lengthy study report to read, which is why I made a point to say that if you weren't up to it, it would be entirely understandable.
There's no summary, just what they have published. Here is the paper's abstaract and introduction. I think it pretty much covers the approach taken by this group of reseachers.
Even the abstract and introduction are lengthy themselves. But in the hopes of wetting some people's appitites I've included it below. This study is in regards to
amphetamine use, rather than methamphetamine use. Methamphetamine is not popular in Europe, where as, amphetamine is.
I would just like to mention to the folks who are not accustomed to reading scientific studies, that you simply can't just read a couple of paragraphs and expect to be able to make a reasonable critique or comment about the study or its findings.
Unlike magazine articles that contain a good deal of fluff, scientific studies contain an observation (
findings) along with supporting evidence (
data) to qualify the observation. And without reading the full study, you can either miss the complete observation (which can be rather complex, covering many pages), and/or you can miss the supporting evidence (which can also be complex0.
At the same time, there are a lot of scientific studies which lack some quality that would be appearent to the trained eye. That is why such studies go before a peer review (are picked apart by other experts in the same field) before they are published (or in some cases are denied publication due to critical flaws in the study).
Anyway, here is the Abstract (the statement summarizing the important points of a text) and the Introduction.
http://www.cedro-uva.org/lib/uitermark.amphetamine.html
Uitermark, Justus, & Peter Cohen (2004), Amphetamine users in Amsterdam. Patterns of use and modes of self-regulation.
© Copyright 2004 Justus Uitermark & Peter Cohen
Amphetamine users in Amsterdam
Patterns of use and modes of self-regulation[1]
Justus Uitermark & Peter Cohen
Abstract
After identifying some omissions in existing literature on research on amphetamine use, this paper sets forth to answer some questions with respect to (1) use patterns, (2) advantages and disadvantages of amphetamine use as experienced by users (3) the formal and informal modes of control that users employ to reduce or negate negative side-effects of amphetamine use, and (4) the role of context variables in fostering in facilitating these modes of control. The paper draws on a sample of 109 experienced and recent amphetamine users in Amsterdam and a follow-up sample of 67 respondents of the original 109. Through a discussion of use patterns over long periods of time, a longitudinal perspective is provided. Some policy implications are discussed.
1. Introduction
During the past ten years, a number of studies have argued that the dangers of amphetamine use should not be underestimated. These studies generally fall within one of two categories.
Studies in the first category have tried to study to what extent there is something like an ‘amphetamine dependency syndrome’ (e.g. Topp and Darke, 1997; Topp and Mattick, 1997a-b; Vincent et al., 1998). Using various measures of dependence or addiction, they have argued that amphetamine use may lead to severe forms of dependency in some or even most users. However, the problem with these studies is that it is questionable whether the results can be generalized to amphetamine users in toto, for they have only investigated amphetamine use in extreme-use samples – not community or population samples that include all users but mostly or only users who belong to a subculture in which heavy (intravenous) use is the norm[2]. Such groups do not form everywhere and where they do, not all or even most amphetamine users are part of extreme-use subcultures. It remains to be seen whether amphetamine users who do not belong to such groups also report high levels of use and associated problems. Moreover, these studies have not shed light upon the processes that lead respondents to report high scores on scales of dependency. They tend to assume a priori that the problems associated with amphetamine use can be directly attributed to the properties of the drug and its action on the user, only allowing for different impacts on individuals related to level of education or route of ingestion. In doing so, they tend to ignore a whole range of mediating factors. As we will argue below, the ability of drug users to regulate their own behavior, which is, at least partly, determined by the socio-cultural environment of which they are part, is one of the most important of these factors.
The second category of studies on amphetamine use explicitly focuses on special samples of groups of users, such as people who consult drug counselors or who make use of needle exchanges. It is an explicit goal of these studies to focus exclusively on a very select group of amphetamine users – again, typically the most extreme users - who constitute a potential target group for policies (e.g. Klee, 1997). While these studies may have the merit of mapping out some of the problems faced by a specific category of amphetamine users, their research design, questionnaires and sampling procedures guarantee that amphetamine use will be associated with all kinds of individual problems. We suggest that neither science nor policy is well served when research into the problems of such relatively small and exceptional groups is used to interpret global trends (such as increasing prevalence of amphetamine use in the population).
These two kinds of studies replicate a bias that is evident in research on other drugs, such as cocaine, heroin or cannabis: they focus on specific periods of heavy drug use of groups of people who often have been in the social margin for a long time already. However, these users are not representative of the population who use amphetamines in general, nor are their patterns of use at the moment when they report to researchers and social workers necessarily typical of their overall use pattern. Use patterns often look very different when viewed from a longitudinal perspective. It might well be that most amphetamine users, like users of other drugs, develop informal mechanisms of self-regulation that enable them to avoid escalation of their use and to mitigate the problems that might stem from use of amphetamine or from social responses to it (cf. Zinberg and Harding, 1982; Zinberg, 1984; Cohen, 1989; Waldorf et al., 1991; Cohen and Sas, 1995; Decorte, 2000). To see if this is indeed the case, we report on a sample of 109 experienced and recent amphetamine respondents in Amsterdam. In order to provide a long-term perspective, we conducted a follow-up survey in which 67 of these respondents of the first sample participated. We do not argue that our sample is fully representative of all different patterns of amphetamine use. On the contrary, we discuss use patterns of a fairly peculiar social group in a specific setting. We argue that our case study demonstrates that certain types of problematic behavior associated with prolonged amphetamine consumption tend to occur under specific conditions and are rare or absent when amphetamine users regulate their use. We look at mainstream citizens who use amphetamine rather than socially marginalized users, and we do not see the patterns of use and types of behavior normally associated, both in academic literature and public imagination, with amphetamine use.
The discussion on the self-regulation of drug use and career patterns, a neglected topic in the area of amphetamine research, is relevant to debates on drug policy. The approach one chooses to study drug use has indirect but important implications for drug policy. So far, both research and policy have been developed on the premise that each drug use can and often is a step towards addiction. Such an approach has no eye for various ways in which users manage their use in such a way as to avoid the extreme-use that is the prime focus of research and policy. By choosing an alternative analytical approach that foregrounds self-regulation of use, we highlight some new ways of conceptualizing both amphetamine use and policy options.
Most of the research on amphetamine use (and indeed other drug use) focuses on drug related problems and opportunities for policy interventions. We look at these issues from another angle. In essence our view on drug policy is liberal in the sense that we try to establish what kind of policy actions would be most appropriate if the goal is not simply to reduce the prevalence of drug use but instead to establish the conditions under which individuals are best able to manage their own drug use. Our approach is similar to the diverse group of practices known as harm reduction (see Caulkins and Reuter, 1997).
However, we feel that, by focusing on harm or even its reduction neglects the other side of the equation, namely that users can also derive benefits from drug use. The common harm reduction view that the object of policy should not be reducing use but rather reducing harm can incidentally reinforce some of the more traditional ideas about drug use. Rather than negating the idea that people use drugs because they are sick (‘addicted’) or lack moral standards, such harm reduction perspectives generally have been silent about the social origins and functions of drug use. In contrast, we direct attention to the reasons and motives users have for using drugs and on how their amphetamine use unfolds over time (cf. Shaw, 2002). In what follows, we thus (1) take into account the reasons drug users have for using drugs, (2) investigate what role mechanisms of self-regulation play in the mitigation of negative effects that can arise, and (3) consider policy options that might facilitate and support these mechanisms. This approach leads us to five specific questions:
- How did the use patterns of respondents develop over time: is their use escalating, stable, fluctuating or declining?
- To what extent do respondents experience negative side effects of amphetamine use?
- To what extent do respondents develop mechanisms of self-regulation and what is the nature of these mechanisms?
- To what extent do mechanisms of self-regulation contain the negative effects of amphetamine use, and to what extent do respondents experience lasting and serious problems that are associated with amphetamine use?
- How might public policy mitigate the negative effects associated with some patterns of amphetamine use and how might policy facilitate efforts of users to maximize the advantages they find in amphetamine use while minimizing the disadvantages?
In the second section below, we discuss the main characteristics of our sample and show that it largely consists of a new generation of amphetamine users. In the third section, we describe the user careers of the respondents by showing how their level of use varies over time. In the fourth section, we discuss the problems respondents reported as associated with amphetamine use. We show that problems considered typical of amphetamine use do not occur in all or even most of the respondents. We focus in the fifth section on the modes of self-regulation that help the respondents to curtail disadvantages and to optimize advantages. In the sixth section, we describe the small group of respondents who report relatively high levels of use and signs of losing control over their amphetamine use, and we try to answer the question whether the problems of these respondents are permanent or temporary. Finally, we interpret the presented data and we distill some policy implications.
To continue reading go to:
http://www.cedro-uva.org/lib/uitermark.amphetamine.html
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
