Adolescents use information on the Internet to tailor their drug use, sometimes with the aim of minimizing risk but often to extend their experimentation, results of a small study suggest.

“Right now, Web sites with the most credibility among one target audience - potential drug users - are drug encyclopedias, those Web sites which appear to promote drug use,” study author Dr. Edward W. Boyer, of Children’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, told AMN Health.

“To the extent that is true, Internet drug information, on balance, is not beneficial and promotes poor health-making decisions, including the decision to experiment with a drug that an individual believes to be ‘safe,’ he said. “The balance needs to be tipped toward healthful decisions.”

These findings are based on the responses of 12 adolescents and young adults, aged 13 to 25 years, who were treated for substance abuse at Children’s Hospital or in the emergency department at UMass-Memorial Medical Center in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Each of the nine male and three female patients said that the information they found on the Internet had in some way influenced their use of psychoactive substances, Boyer and his team report in this month’s issue of the journal Pediatrics.

In some cases, study participants adopted certain behaviors in an attempt to minimize the risks associated with their drug use. For example, after learning about marijuana on various cannabis-related Internet sites, one 16-year-old boy commented, “Now I only smoke weed through a filter, because, you know, there might be carcinogens in the smoke.”

In other cases, several adolescents began using a particular drug after reading online information. A 17-year-old boy said, “If it hadn’t been for Erowid (an online drug encyclopedia), I wouldn’t have used the drugs.” A 23-year-old man said the Internet “exposed (him) to drugs that nobody else knows about.” A 19-year-old woman said she learned “that the high (from OxyContin) was like heroin… So I started snorting it.”

What’s more, a 15-year-old girl began using more of a particular substance after obtaining information about it on the Internet. “I, like, couldn’t find a reason not to use it,” she said.

There were also a few instances in which adolescents stopped using a particular substance in light of information gleaned from the Internet. One 18-year-old man who “found out that you can go into withdrawal from Prozac,” said he did not want to be addicted to that drug or any similar substance.

Overall, 10 of the study participants said they preferred to use online drug encyclopedia,  to obtain information about psychoactive substances. Two said they visited WebMD, or a government antidrug Web site or some other mainstream Internet site. One adolescent also used a medical textbook to verify the information obtained on the Internet.

“Information available on the Internet affects a broad range of decisions related to drug using behaviors in adolescents,” Boyer said.

“Well-designed Web sites can potentially direct adolescents toward healthful decision making,” according to the researcher. “Currently, however, most Web sites that adolescents find credible do not do that,” he said.

Boyer’s research was funded by a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

SOURCE: Pediatrics, February 2005.