Musicians ‘are more likely to take drugs’

MUSICAL ability is more likely to go hand in hand with drug use, reasearchers have found.

While the Beatles and the Rolling Stones helped cement the link in the swinging sixties, musicianship and banned substances have gone together much longer.

Louis Armstrong was fond of smoking marijuana and wrote a song Muggles –a slang term for the substance – in 1928.

In many cases musicians’ drug use has led to tragedy such as Jimi Hendrix and more recently Amy Winehouse.

Researchers who looked at whether those with musical ability are more likely to take drugs found a mild correlation.

David Greenberg, f rom Cambridge University, studied what personality traits are linked to musical ability.

As part of the study he looked at whether musical people drank more alcohol or took more drugs. In the Journal of Research in Personality Professor Greenberg wrote: ‘As the well-known phrase “sex, drugs and rock and roll” suggests, substance use has long been infused in music culture.’

He and his team carried out an online test of musical ability on over 7,000 people and gave them a questionnaire that asked how often they used drugs and alcohol.

Professor Greenberg did find a link and said ‘recreational drug use was also positively linked to various musical sophistication domains’ – in particular how skilled people were with melody and rhythm.

Use of alcohol did not differ greatly between the musical and non-musical. The test did not look at how often musicians had sex. The researchers also found a link between those who were open to new experiences and being tuneful or tone deaf.