replying to --
>>> Timothy D. Brooks, MD <[log in to unmask]> 08/22/96 03:21pm
>>> who wrote to ADDICT-L:
I am sorry to join this thread late.  Does anyone have the reference for
the information on drug use in teens other than the Phil. Inq.?  Thank you
in advance.
-----
 
refs: New York Times (national edition) August 21, 1996, p. A8.
Followup story with various pundits: NYTimes August 22, 1996, p. A15.
 
Here in Ontario there is the same trend as in the US, with about the same
timing (the student surveys are only done every two years here).  Drug
use -- legal and illegal drugs -- started turning up after the 1991 survey.
The attention-grabber in the 1995 survey was that the proportion of kids
smoking marijuana in the last year was 12% in 1993, 23% in 1995.  (Ed
Adlaf et al., The Ontario Student Drug Use Survey: 1977-1995.  Ontario:
Addiction Research Foundation, 1995)   The same kind of reversal, with
a new trend to an upswing, has been found in some European countries.
   So it's not likely that changes in US prevention or treatment funding are
much of an explanation.  Nor which party holds the Presidency.  We are
dealing with movements in popular behaviour that are not determined by
governments, nor even by commercial interests.  In the alcohol field,
some of us have written about the "long waves of consumption" (e.g., in
Klaus Makela et al., Alcohol, Society, and the State vol. 1, Toronto: ARF,
1981) -- waves with about a 75-year period, with peaks for the US in the
1830s, around 1900, and at 1980, and speculated about generational
forgetting processes over a three-generational period.  Lloyd Johnston is
quoted in the NYT Wed. applying a generational forgetting description to
youthful drug use over the last two decades or so -- a rather different
period!
   We have been scratching our heads here for the last year about what
is going on with kids, and Jessica Warner and others have been doing
and analyzing focus groups.  We are supposed to be the experts, we
are supposed to know, and all we can do is apply labels like generational
forgetting or long waves that look like analyses but are really just
tendentious descriptions.  The available quantitative data doesn't offer
much of a clue to what goes on in the hearts of boys and girls from one
decade to the next.
   One recent book I have found suggestive is one not about drugs at all:
Sara Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital,
Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 1995.  She studies the teenagers -- 12-20 or
so -- who go to and hang around dance clubs associated with different
music styles in Britain.  She sees the clubbers' devotion to and detailed
knowledge of the particular music style as a kind of "cultural capital": i.e.,
a way they mark themselves off as distinctive from other teenagers and
adults, as more "in the know" than others (this is an adaptation of the
argument of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu about social
distinctions as status claims and markers).  Drugs are very much a part
of the club world, although differentially in terms of which drugs and
how much for different music styles.
   Seeing drugs as a youth status marker and boundary marker, not only
from adults but also between different youth subcultures, pays attention
to what is going on autonomously among youth.  Of course, the fact that
drugs are available for this kind of symbolic purpose is set up for the
youth cultures by what has been going on in the larger society. Nancy
Reagan's "Just Say No!" offered a wonderful foil which made drugs the
perfect medium for youth rebellion. (I made the same argument about
heavy drinking as a symbol of 1920s U.S. college kids' revolt against
"Victorian morality" -- see  "A `reverence for strong drink': the Lost
Generation and the elevation of alcohol in American culture", Journal of
Studies on Alcohol 45:540-546, 1984.)  (The art students, always ahead
of the fashion curve, at the California College of Arts and Crafts, made a
wonderful poster in the mid-1980s of Nancy Reagan looking like the
wicked witch of the west shaking a finger next to the slogan, Just Say
No!)....  Since Nancy Reagan's writ did not run quite so large in Canada,
she cannot be held personally responsible for what's happening now,
any more than Clinton and Gingrich or Kim Campbell (former Canadian
prime minister who admitted to taking a toke while in college) can.   Then
there's the media.  In my view they do not make these trends, but they
can certainly amplify them, as they are currently doing.  I picked up the
Thornton book in a display in an Edinburgh bookstore featuring a novel
about and called Ecstasy, by Irving Welsh, the author of Trainspotting,
and other books on British youth/drug cultures.  (For the same
phenomenon for the 1920s and alcohol again, see my "The movies and
the wettening of America: the media as amplifiers of cultural change",
British Journal of Addiction 83:11-18, 1988....  For another aspect,
Charles Winick once wrote an article connecting the dominant illicit drug
and its effects with the jazz style of each decade in the US from the
1930s to the 1960s.)
   Robin