What is the future of addiction and the Internet — will more people be locked in rooms alone communicating wholly electronically, increasingly with entities that may not actually be human? A European group has created an international effort to attack drug and alcohol problems through the Internet and other cutting-edge media. Stanton reviews this group's efforts and the larger theoretical issues they must confront.

Nordisk alkohol- & narkotikatidskrift, 18(1), 2001, 114-118

Review of Telematic Drug and Alcohol Prevention: Guidelines and Experience from Prevnet Euro

Morristown, NJ

How will the Internet and other communications advances impact substance abuse and addiction? Consider the impact of television and home computers. Programming on television and other media discouraging drug and alcohol use has been a media staple since drugs first became a matter of concern as a society-wide problem, as early as the 1960s. Although there have been criticisms that Hollywood did not discourage — and actually encouraged — drug use for a time, the general slant of the mass media has been anti-drug, anti-youthful drinking, and pro-Alcoholics Anonymous and pro other alcohol and drug treatment. This trend has accelerated over the last 10-15 years.

Popular television shows are filled with characters who are recovering alcoholics and addicts. Edifying tales of the descent into alcohol and drug abuse and recovery therefrom are prominent in television programming and movie fare. In movies like "Clean and Sober," "28 Days," "Leaving Las Vegas," and "Permanent Midnight," America's leading actors (Michael Keaton, Sandra Bullock, Nicholas Cage, Ben Stiller) depict the joy of sobriety and the effectiveness of current treatment programs, along with the horror and degradation of alcoholism and drug addiction. When a television program shows a teenager consuming alcohol, the viewer knows that disaster is the inevitable result (crash, violence, alcoholism), just as earlier formal and informal film production codes guaranteed that any character committing a crime or having illicit sex must be penalized by the end of a picture.

So, obviously, young people have stopped abusing drugs and alcohol — not! It is more accurate to say that illicit drug use — although it ebbs and flows - is a regular feature of life for many older adolescents, and a majority of older adolescents in the U.K., the U.S., Australia, and many other Western nations have consumed these substances at some time. Meanwhile, a majority of older teens in many Western nations have been drunk, and substantial minorities get drunk regularly.

Anti-drug and anti-alcohol communications, then, do not directly translate into abstemious behavior by young people. Among the possible explanations for this disconnect between intention and performance are that popular media are not a good way to communicate anti-drug and anti-alcohol messages; that the particular versions of these messages that are most utilized are ineffective; that drug and alcohol use and abuse are functions of larger, less controllable social forces than media programming.

Indeed, popular media may even encourage addiction, especially when we examine substance abuse and addiction in a broader context than drug and alcohol use. For example, youthful obesity and related diseases such as atherosclerosis and acquired diabetes have created a massive assault on public health among teens in the U.S., and increasingly the rest of the Western world. Although TV and other media regularly present messages of physical fitness, a sedentary life style centered around TV and home computers, along with consumption of fast and packaged foods (advertising for which is a staple on television) create an opposing reality. In addition, the attachments many teens form to TV, computer games, and the Internet are themselves definable as addictions.

Here we see the truth to McLuhan's "the medium is the message" — that is, the method of relating to communication media has more impact than the specific content transmitted via these media. Television viewing is a passive, consumer experience, and thus television encourages these addictogenic ways of relating to the environment. Computers and the Internet entail little physical activity, but do encourage active intellectual participation by users. As a result, although potentially stimulating, these new media continue to isolate individuals from direct contact with their environments. How will the interactive electronic media era — including having actual people at the other end of electronic messages — impact youthful outlooks and relationships, and, particularly, the susceptibility to drug and alcohol abuse and addiction?

Prevnet Euro — a five-country EU project — has pioneered an effort to analyze and to harness the role of the Internet and other telematic media (the Internet, videoconferencing, and telephone services) in preventing drug and alcohol abuse. Prevnet Euro includes five specific projects initiated in Spain, Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. The work of this trans-European project is summarized in Telematic Drug and Alcohol Prevention. Published in Helsinki, and edited by Tuuka Tammi and Teuvo Peltoniemi, the book suggests the dominance of a Scandinavian — and particularly a Finnish — outlook, a perhaps natural consequence of the traditional preoccupations of the Nordic countries with substance abuse and Finland's status as a telephonic society. For example, the book notes, "there are more Internet users per capita in Scandianvian countries" than anywhere else in the world, while Southern European nations are underrepresented among Internet users.

The cross-national perspective and intentional openness of the Prevnet Euro organizers guarantees that the project considers a range of objectives. Nonetheless, the entire enterprise of "drug and alcohol prevention" might indicate certain biases. From an American standpoint — where the most obvious media anti-drug efforts are often strident and hysterical propaganda from the Partnership for a Drug-Free America and where disease conceptions of addiction are considered as indelible truths — the book is refreshingly sensible and social-psychologically oriented. For example, protective factors against substance abuse are listed as personal skills, hobbies and interests, and attention to socially or psychologically misfit or deprived youths — ideas that would fall to the left along the political-medical continuum of views on substance abuse in the U.S.

At the same time, listed as a risk factor is "starting to drink . . .at a young age" — a conception that might not be shared by many communities around Europe. The book also does not seem to know quite what to do with Web sites and organizations concerned with changing drug policy. In some places, the volume equates opponents of punitive policies with those encouraging drug use: ". . .some US sites even offer instructions on how to synthesize certain substances. . ., tips on the best situations to take drugs in, how to deal with comedowns. . . . They are often quite political and discuss current legislation etc. and some are outright advocates of legalisation. . . ." (p. 39)