Illegal Leisure: The Normalisation of Adolescent Recreational Drug Use

Extract

This book provides a full account of the North West Longitudinal Study of adolescent drug use. This quantitative and qualitative research was the largest single survey of adolescent drug use in Britain, although its findings are similar in many respects to the numerous, smaller local and national cross-sectional studies that began in the mid-1980s and have continued since. The North West Longitudinal Study was able to attract considerable resources and given its longitudinal validity provides a considerable payoff in terms of methodological robustness when compared to the many smaller, somewhat isolated studies.

Nevertheless the specific results overall are not that much different from the many other studies, in that we know that recreational drug use has increased in popularity and acceptance among young people, and to some extent the points of detail about which drug is fashionable in what time and space seem increasingly less interesting (although these are important details for locally based service providers and health educators).