Research Article Novel Psychoactive Substances in Young Adults with and without Psychiatric Comorbidities

Copyright © 2014 Giovanni Martinotti et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Objective. Comorbidities between psychiatric diseases and consumption of traditional substances of abuse (alcohol, cannabis, opioids, and cocaine) are common. Nevertheless, there is no data regarding the use of novel psychoactive substances (NPS) in the psychiatric population. The purpose of this multicentre survey is to investigate the consumption of a wide variety of psychoactive substances in a young psychiatric sample and in a paired sample of healthy subjects. Methods. A questionnaire has been administered, in different Italian cities, to 206 psychiatric patients aged 18 to 26 years and to a sample of 2615 healthy subjects matched for sex, gender, and living status. Results. Alcohol consumption was more frequent in the healthy young population compared to age-matched subjects suffering from mental illness (79.5 % versus 70.7%