BOOK REVIEW
modern (or is it post-modern?) world. It is noted
Illegal Leisure: The Normalisation of
Adolescent Recreational Drug Use
Howard Parker, John Aldridge and Fiona
Measham
Routledge, London, 1998
192 pp. ISBN 0-415-15810-9
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).
From an academic point of view, the need to
draw all this data into some theoretical synthesis
that seeks to explain why politicians enjoy the
rhetoric of a war against drugs when many of the
battles are a waste of time and money needs
urgent revision. A number of academics have made
important historical contributions to this theoretical
development, in particular Jock Young’s paradigm
of a society needing to find moral scapegoats. The
problem is that decades later social science has
not done much more to critically expose a policy
system (so called ‘harm reduction’) that seeks to
take health promotion seriously by enlightening
the ‘harmful’ choices that young people make,
and which rather denies the wider social and
psychological traumas that young people face in a
© Oxford University Press 1999
that the authors in this text prefer the term ‘mod-
ern’, citing Giddens. If prescribed methadone now
causes more fatal overdoses than illegal heroin can
the policy really be called ‘harm reduction’? What
about undertaking a piece of research that considers
a broader picture of the various harms done to
adolescents by modern society, communities and
families—from the adolescent perspective?
The authors do begin to explore a theoretical
synthesis in the final chapter, but one cannot help
thinking that the study was driven too much by an
individualized and at best social psychological
account of the meaning of drug use. The first
chapter explores social context, but this information
is then rather ignored in the analysis of findings
in the later chapters. Many of the qualitative quotes
from young people are describing the drugs they
took, how they took them, when and where. The
quantitative information deals with the types of
drugs that are most popular, the frequency of use,
etc. The problem is that we have seen many of
these types of frequency tables before. There is an
underlying clinical empiricism in this book and
this makes the book too similar to the prevailing
ethos of focusing on the apparent necessity to
describe, and measure the scale of, adolescent drug
taking, rather than examining what this adolescent
drug taking is about. We read details of individuals
financial, substance and emotional status, but what
is lacking is an account of how the young people
see the families, communities and society in which
they are placed, what they make of the social,
political and economic values they are exposed to,
and how their evolving view and values about
substances correspond to their critique of society.
By the final chapter we do not need any more
convincing that adolescent substance use is now
relatively ‘normal’, but the authors remind us of
this fact using the grand term ‘normalisation thesis’.
After hundreds (if not thousands) of local health
authority prevalence studies and several national
studies hopefully this is now fairly widely accepted.
Of more interest are comments like ‘To grow up
today is to grow up in a risk society’ and those
‘growing up today feel far less secure and more
uncertain for far longer’.
707
Book review
Applied social science has been obsessed with
documenting adolescent drug use in terms of
prevalence and incidence for some 20 years now.
What is urgently needed for the next Millennium
is a new social science account of the process of
adolescence in modern (or is it post-modern?)
society given the social stresses and uncertainties
that the authors acknowledge as so influential on
children. What does it mean to be a young adult
in a world without a clear moral consensus, where
political ambivalence is endemic, where people
have high psychological, educational and material
expectations, but face the experience of fragmented
families and communities? If social scientists
stopped focusing on a descriptive analysis of drug
708
trends and start asking young people what they
comprehend of the society we now live in, then
we might be in for some very interesting new
social science reading and hopefully might get
some new ideas for health promotion policies. This
book is an important account of a certain style of
research which has dominated one aspect of drugs
policy, but it must mark the end of an era and
open the door to a new synthesis of adolescent
drug use. What is the real meaning of adolescent
drug use? This is a question for social scientists
to address in the next Millennium.
Philip Haynes
Senior Lecturer in Social Policy
University of Brighton