Representation of a drug in long-term drug users

The authors searched the relation between mental representation of drug and the self in regular drug users. They suppose: that the aspects of the Self are close to internal pole on the scale from internality to externality. They used ASQ questionnaire (Petterson and Seligman et al. 1982) in order to assess relation between the subject's level of internality and mental representations of different objects, which the subject stated as a cause of eight imagined situations. They sorted these causes. One of the nine categories was ,,the drug''. The internality in the case of ,,drug'' category was significantly higher than in the case of categories, which consist of causes I elated to other people ol external events. They also compared these categories for every situation separately. In seven from eight situations the ,,drug'' as a cause occurred (in 2 to 8 cases). They compared the categories according to internality. Especially the category ,,drug'' to other eight categories, including such causes, which are rather related to subject oneself and which can be influenced by own free will. In six situations from seven the category ,,drug'' was connected with the highest internality among all categories. The results support the hypothesis about close relation between mental representation of the drug and Self in regular drug users.