Howard Parker

Illegal leisure: the normalization of adolescent recreational drug use.

Illegal Leisureoffers a unique insight into the role drug use now plays in British youth culture. With half this generation having tried an illicit drug and up to a quarter using drugs regularly, this study explains why, despite parental angst, universal programs and a determined war on drugs, all efforts to ban illegal leisure have failed.

The Normalization of 'Sensible' Recreational Drug Use: Further Evidence from the North West England Longitudinal Study

Five key dimensions of normalization are identified: availability/access; drug trying rates; usage rates; accommodating attitudes to ‘sensible’ recreational drug use especially by non users; and degree of cultural accommodation of illegal drug use. A review of recent UK research is provided for each measure. The NW England Longitudinal Study continues to monitor normalization based on the recapture of 465 young adults (in year 2000) of a cohort previously surveyed/interviewed across their adolescence (1991 to 1995).The availability of drugs remains high with over 90% having been in drug offer situations. Accessibility is highest for cannabis, followed by ‘dance drugs’, with cocaine showing the steepest climb. Drug trying rates have risen incrementally from 36 percent at 14 to 76 percent at 22. At 18 over half reported past year drug use and at 22 the rate is unchanged (52 percent). Past month use at 32 percent has declined slightly. Males are now slightly more likely to be drug-involved on all measures. Socio-economic differences are not significant. Cannabis dominates recent usage (average three episodes a month). Half the abstainers have friends who have used cannabis. Nearly two thirds of abstainers held tolerant or approving attitudes of drug takers. Half held different views about different drugs, with cannabis use being most tolerated. The paper concludes that ‘sensible’ recreational drug use is becoming increasingly accommodated into the social lives of conventional young adults.

Normalization as a barometer: Recreational drug use and the consumption of leisure by younger Britons

This article discusses the development of the normalization thesis in respect of monitoring sustained increases in young Britons’ consumption of illicit drugs and alcohol over the past decade. It describes five dimensions of normalization which have been applied in a cluster of studies undertaken by the author, highlighting results from the N.W. England Longitudinal Study showing easy accessibility, high rates of drug trying (76% at 22 years) and long-term recreational drugs careers involving both alcohol and illicit drugs. The social accommodation of ‘sensible’ substance use was apparent amongst most drug abstainers in the cohort who routinely had close friends who used drugs ‘recreationally’. Further cultural acceptance of recreational drug use is described. A sixth dimension – state or government responses to widespread recreational drug use – is introduced and illustrated. The article concludes by emphasizing the negative outcomes associated with recreational poly substance use in terms of personal and public health highlighting the ‘slippage’ from recreational to problem drug use as a growing phenomenon. It calls for a more integrative national strategy to address negative aspects of normalization.

The Teenage Transition: From Adolescent Recreational Drug Use to the Young Adult Dance Culture in Britain in the MID-1990s:

This paper gives an overview of some of the most recent research surrounding the use of prohibited or illicit drugs by young people in Britain. Current research on the prevalence of illicit drug use identifies an unprecedented rise in such use by increasingly diverse groups of young people of all socioeconomic backgrounds. Presenting here for the first time 4 years of data from the University of Manchester northwest longitudinal study of English adolescent drug use, the paper looks at patterns of use of different drugs, differential experiences with these drugs, and characteristics of use and non-use throughout the mid-teens. Along with this transformation in adolescent drug use has been a similar rise in the prevalence of drug use by young adults, which is located in the context of the dance party or ‘rave’ scene in Britain, linked to the ‘dance revolution’ and to a wider youth culture that reflects an acceptance of drug use both by users and non-users as a part of young peoples leisure. This has led the authors to identify a process of ‘normalization’ of recreational drug use among young people with resulting legal, education, employment, and health implications.

Pick ‘n’ Mix: changing patterns of illicit drug use amongst 1990s adolescents

A follow up self report questionnaire survey of drug use amongst 752 15–16 year olds was conducted at the end of 1992. 71% of this representative sample from north west England reported having been in ‘offer’ situations where drugs were available. Nearly half (47%) has tried an illicit drug, most often cannabis, followed by LSD. These rates are substantially higher than those recorded during the 1980s amongst this age group. A further change concerns young women who, in this survey, were equally as likely to have been in offer situations and tried illicit drugs as young men. Social class differences are also reducing with drug triers only slightly more likely to come from working class backgrounds than middle class. These changes suggest that the illegal drugs economy has meshed with the legal economy in the social space young people frequent and that a process of normalisation is underway in respect of adolescent recreational drug use. This social transformation has significance for the criminal justice ...

Intoxicated Weekends: Young adults' work hard-play hard lifestyles, public health and public disorder

Going out at the weekends binge drinking is a leisure priority of the majority of young English adults. This going-out sector is described via a cohort (n = 465) of 22 year olds who have been tracked by the North West Longitudinal Study (1991–2001) since they were 13. This cohort is made up of conventional, educated and employed young people. However, over half are regular heavy drinkers and occasional recreational drug users. They often mix alcohol and illicit drugs on nights out. Their motives for intoxicated weekends relate to maintaining successful work hard–play hard lifestyles. Most nights out are perceived as functional and enjoyable but some go wrong leading to arguments, fights and assaults (the public disorder agenda) and impaired judgement, illness and accidents (the public health agenda). These negative outcomes are probably inevitable given the scale and functions of nights out. Better management of nightlife requires an integrative strategy which recognizes the added value of focusing on the care and welfare of the overall going-out population rather than targeting ‘trouble makers’ and reacting to ad hoc disorder and mishap.

UK Drugs Unlimited: New Research and Policy Lessons on Illicit Drug Use

This book describes the diverse nature of contemporary drug use in Britain, from club kids to addicts. It investigates why current drug policy is floundering.

Pathology or Modernity? Rethinking Risk Factor Analyses of Young Drug Users

As a working social scientist whose research group has been monitoring UK youth culture and young people’s alcohol and illicit drug use for the past 20 years, I want to reflect on how my theoretical and conceptual thinking has been continuously challenged and revised. The main source of challenge has come from our two longitudinal studies of English adolescents. Being still attached to a cohort of 500 young adults (Williams and Parker, 2001; Parker et al., 2002), now 23 from when they were 13 in 1991 (Parker et al., 1998) and 1000 more from the Northern Regions of England across their adolescence (13! 18 years) (Morris et al., 2002; Egginton and Parker, 2002), has been a challenging and occasionally inspirational professional experience. As an old dog trying to learn new tricks about young people growing up in a ‘risk society’ where consumption is central, I have, in particular, had to re-think the way risk factoring, so central to alcohol and drugs research, is being utilised and interpreted. Essentially I want to argue that we need to revise the way we define risk and protective factors in relation to youthful heavy drinking and now extensive ‘recreational’ drug use certainly in respect of the UK and Western Europe. There is an enormous international literature which explores and explains why a minority of adolescents have poor outcomes – educationally, behaviourally, occupationally and epidemologically. The Risk Matrix Paradigm (RMP) has been a potent driver of anti-crime and social inclusion programmes and has been central to the development of ‘preventing’ drug ‘abuse’. Seminal work by the likes of Kendal, Caulkins and Hawkins has inspired a generation of social scientists, mostly North American, to search adolescent populations for statistically significant risk factors which are both deleterious in their own right but also predict poor outcomes in adulthood. This paradigm remains robust and practically useful when we apply its methodologies to the UK’s young problem drug users. The substantial population of young heroin and now crack cocaine users are indeed predominantly from the social exclusion zones and display nearly all the classic ‘deficits’ in respect of family life, education, unsupervised adolescence, poor educational outcomes and early delinquency. Indeed so potent is the RMP in profiling this vulnerable population that government policy has introduced formal procedures that assess young people for multiple risk. The youth justice system, for instance, now systematically scores young offenders and plans correctional programmes and drugs interventions accordingly. Numerous community regeneration projects are similarly influenced.

Going out drinking: the centrality of heavy alcohol use in English adolescents’ leisure time and poly-substance-taking repertoires

Using data from a large-scale longitudinal study, this paper highlights the development and centrality of regular, heavy drinking in the leisure priorities of a cohort of English adolescents (13-18 years). A core cohort (n = 815) with complete survey data across the study is used alongside qualitative interview data. Weekly drinking increased incrementally from 22.9% at 13 years to 73.7% at 18 years. A third of the cohort at 18 years, based on past 7-day consumption, were drinking over twice ‘safe’ limits. Heavy drinkers were far more likely to be smokers and two-thirds (67.5%) had also used an illicit drug in the past year. The combining of alcohol and illicit drugs was widespread on ‘nights out’. Drug use was facilitated by going out drinking in respect of set, setting, access and intoxicated decision making. The ‘going out’ sub-sample in this cohort who drank heavily/used drugs have displayed few psychosocial risk markers. Most share the protective factors of being in education, employment or training and coming from conventional families. Practically significant ‘risks’ in the going-out group were situational and consequential, being related to their propensity to prioritise going out at weekends to get intoxicated as part of their ‘time out’. Public health/harm reduction initiatives are recommended to reduce negative outcomes.

The new drugs interventions industry: What outcomes can drugs/criminal justice treatment programmes realistically deliver?

The aspirational goal of significant crime reduction through delivering drugs treatment interventions at all points of the criminal justice system cannot be easily achieved. Mainstream drugs services do not yet have the capacity or competence to routinely deliver effective treatment outcomes. Moreover, local ad hoc inter-agency partnerships do not provide a robust delivery system for such an ambitious and complex national project. The government’s fast-track approach risks setting this developing industry up to under perform. A patient evidencebased approach is required, which recognizes that modernizing the whole drugs treatment sector will be more cost effective, in the long run, than over-reliance on ambitious criminal justice interventions.