Waldron, Jonathan Christopher James; (2020) Drug Use in Young Adults Engaging with the Nightlife Scene: A Longitudinal European Survey. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

The use of alcohol and illicit drugs has long been a feature in the nightlife scene. However, there is a current paucity of research on contemporary patterns of drug use in European nightlife populations. Furthermore, there have been considerable developments in the European drug market, potentially placing people at elevated risk of harm. In Chapter 1, I provide an overview of this key gap in the literature and introduce the ALAMA-Nightlife project, a multi-country collaboration designed to address this. In Chapter 2, I demonstrate that the internet can be successfully used to recruit a sample of young European adults engaging with the nightlife scene, by showing an online sample to be broadly representative in terms of drug use, nightlife engagement and demographics as an offline sample recruited at nightclubs and festivals. The cross-sectional profiles of drug use are examined in Chapter 3, with Latent Class Analysis revealing six distinct subgroups indicating substantial heterogeneity in drug use patterns. Furthermore, increasing levels of polydrug use were associated with higher scores on indices of problematic alcohol and drug use. In Chapter 4, I examined the relationship between harm reduction and polydrug use, and identified five discrete patterns of personal protective strategies that differed in levels of polydrug use. Extensive endorsement of harm reduction behaviours was also associated with more positive and fewer negative consequences following drug use. Longitudinal trajectories of drug use in the European nightlife scene are assessed in Chapter 5, with findings suggesting considerable stability over the course of 12 months. Amongst the small percentage whose use did change at follow-up, both an increase and decrease were associated with lower perceptions of risk, while increasing or decreasing the number of electronic dance music events attended was associated with a corresponding change in drug use. In Chapter 6, I summarise these findings, discuss their implications and how they address current gaps in the evidence while considering their limitations, and suggest areas for future research on drug use in the European nightlife scene.

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