Teenage Substance Abuse Finally Explained: 50 Cent Wants To Get Your Kids Drunk And/Or High
Forget degrading women for a minute, because labcoats at the University Of Pittsburgh School Of Medicine have alighted on a wholly different evil lurking in the lyrics of popular songs. “Tobacco in movies, for example, is now known to lead to smoking,” one doctor told Reuters. “We started realizing adolescents are exposed to two and a half hours a day of music. What’s in the music?” Booze, apparently. Lots and lots of booze. And weed. And huffing glue. And stealing whippets from the mall. And pop stars are shamelessly peddeling all of these to your underage children.
Primack and his team, who presented their findings at a medical meeting, looked at the top 279 songs on the Billboard charts in 2005. They found that 33 percent made references to alcohol and drug use.
Nearly 80 percent of rap songs mentioned substance use, followed by 37 percent of country music lyrics, 20 percent of R&B/hip-hop and 14 percent of rock songs. Only nine percent of pop songs referred to drug or alcohol use.
The researchers only included songs that clearly referred to using drug and alcohol. They also named the substances which included alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, prescription drugs, inhalants, hallucinogens, and substances of unknown origin.
“If someone says, ‘I had one of those pills,’ and you don’t really know what that was, we call that non specific,” Primack explained in an interview.
So what does this mean? Well, nothing at the moment, as “the next step will be to see if there is a relationship between lyrical content and behavior.” Still, from my own anecdotal evidence in a test conducted just minutes ago, they might have a point. I just listened to a George Thorogood song, and I’m drunk. Conincidence?
