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

This is an interesting and comprehensive account of the North West Longitudinal Study, which assesses the attitudes towards, and use of, illicit drugs and alcohol by a cohort of (initially) 776 young people, starting at 14 years of age and continuing to track the cohort until aged 27 years. The book updates and amplifies an earlier publication - Illegal Leisure (Aldridge et al., 1998) − and provides a rich and detailed account of the study, plus some well-considered and carefully argued commentary on both historical and contemporary policy on drug use, and proposals for future change. The final chapter’s contribution to the normalization debate in relation to drug use is particularly interesting.