Investigating drug abuse online

Psychonaut2002, a European Union funded project examining the online drug abuse community, has recently concluded, with input from researchers from eleven EU countries including Dr Alex Baldacchino from the University's Centre for Addiction Research and Education.

The researchers spent last year searching the Internet for websites with content relating to all drugs of abuse.  Thousands of websites were visited during the course of the research. Alex explains, "We now know that there are many websites that are supportive of drug abuse.  These are easily found using the popular internet search engines and provide encouragement to experiment with drugs, and advice on how to use different substances."

Alex continues, "In order to understand the implications of these findings, we need to consider our own attitudes to the nature of drug abuse. It is likely that socio-economic status plays an important part in our evaluation of whether someone has a drug problem or not."

While internet drug abuse remains a silent phenomenon at present and an option open only to those who can easily get online, present efforts to make the Internet accessible to everyone make it likely that this will change.

Alex believes that one side-effect of a reduction in the digital divide may be an increase in the use of the internet to facilitate drug abuse amongst those from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

He says, "Before that happens we need to develop the ability to identify emergent internet-related drug problems as they occur. The speed of change in the digital age requires us to be prepared, so that we have the most up-to-date data on which to base informed and reflexive policy-making. Research such as the Psychonaut2002 project is an important beginning in this process."

A full length feature on this project was in the last issue of eContact. To read it online see /externalrelations/press/econtact/internetdrugabuse.html