How Society and Social Media are Reshaping the Drug Landscape

From hooking up with dealers on Tinder, to adopting a 5:2 approach to health and partying, UK drug culture is changing at a rapid pace. Kate Wills reports on how society and social media are reshaping the landscape.

- Kate Wills

FROM THE WHOOSH OF LAUGHING GAS AT A festival to the wide-eyed water-sippers at a gig, via the exam-stressed student ordering legal highs off the dark web, you don’t have to look far to find someone using illicit substances in the UK. The average drug user is white, educated, healthy, aged 28 and just as likely to be female as male*. But the most recent findings from the Home Office reveal some surprising insights into the way women are buying and sharing drugs.

Cannabis is the go-to choice for two million Brits, with four per cent of women relaxing with a joint last year, while cocaine and ecstasy follow suit in second and third place. And while LSD usage is still relatively small, it’s up 117 per cent compared to 2012/13, proving the trend for all things 70s in 2015 didn’t just extend to fashion*.The biggest game-changer in drug culture, though, has been technology. Silk Road – the most famous of the online black markets – is gone, but a plethora of copycat sites mean that narcotics are now just a click away. Last year, one in five of the UK’s substance users bought their drugs online* even using the likes of Tinder to pick up their highs – a source considered far safer than scoring off a stranger in the street. ‘Drug culture has changed fundamentally by the arrival of internet-based dealers,’ says Mike Power, author of Drugs 2.0: The Web Revolution That’s Changing How The World Gets High. ‘We’ve got a generation of women who get everything off the net – why not drugs? Yet there has been no corresponding revolution in drugs education.’