Illegal Leisure Revisited: Changing Patterns of Alcohol and Drug Use in Adolescents and Young Adults

This book updates the progress into adulthood of the cohort of fourteen-year-olds who were recruited and tracked until they were eighteen years old. Illegal Leisure (1998) described their adolescent journeys and lifestyles, focusing on their early regular drinking and extensive ''recreational'' drug use.

This new edition revisits these original chapters, providing commentaries around them to discuss current implications of the original publication, plus documenting and discussing the group at twenty-two and twenty-seven years of age. Illegal Leisure Revisited positions the journeys of these twenty-somethings against the ever-changing backdrop of a consumption-oriented leisure society, the rapid expansion of the British night-time economy and the place of substance use in contemporary social worlds. It presents to the reader the ways in which these young people have moved into the world of work, long-term relationships and parenthood, and the resulting changes in the function and frequency of their drinking and drug-use patterns. Amid dire public health warnings about their favourite intoxicants, and with the growing criminalisation of a widening array of recreational drugs, the book revisits these young people as they continue as archetypal citizens in a risk society.

The book is ideal reading for researchers and undergraduate students from a variety of fields, such as developmental and social psychology, sociology, criminology, cultural and health studies. Professionals working in criminal justice, health promotion, drugs education, harm reduction and treatment will also find this book an invaluable resource.

Judith Aldridge is Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at the University of Manchester. Her research spans aspects of drug use and drug dealing, including drug dealing within street gangs, and the sales of both illegal and legal psychostimulants.

Fiona Measham is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Lancaster University. Her research focuses on emergent drug trends, club drugs and music scenes, licensed leisure and the night time economy, and UK policy developments. She is a member of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs and the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs.

Lisa Williams is a Lecturer in Criminology at the Centre for Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Manchester. For over a decade, she has researched both recreational and dependent drug use with a focus upon drug use across the life course.