Addicts' attitudes toward drugs: a semantic-differential study.

The Drug Rating Scale, an adaptation of the Osgood semantic-differential technique, was devised to measure the connotative aspects of attitudes toward drugs. Sixty-two heroin-addict clients and fourteen staff members of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic completed the Scale. The Addict group tended to regard heroin in a negative light, possibly consistent with their own lack of self-esteem. Amphetamines and LSD had the greatest distance from heroin in the addicts' "semantic space"; this was consistent with addicts' relative preference for alternative drugs to heroin. The evaluative and activity dimensions provided a plausible assignment of the eight drugs inquired about into four quadrants.