Because of the secretive nature of illicit drug use, there is usually a lag between the appearance of a new drug trend and public information about it. After studying 26 different European magazines for youth, the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) recently concluded that media read by youth “constitutes a useful and low-cost source of information for monitoring and understanding drug trends among defined readerships by reflecting lifestyles that reveal much about young people’s drug behaviour and attitudes that official statistics do not reveal.”
Furthermore, the study found, “Youth magazines studied were more likely than mainstream magazines to cover both the risks and benefits of cannabis and ecstasy use. In contrast, they adopted more proscriptive approaches to heroin and crack.”