A study into New Psychoactive Substances (NPS) - formerly referred to as ‘legal highs’ - provides new evidence about why young people were attracted to the drugs.
The research was carried out by an interdisciplinary team of researchers from Queen’s and the findings recommend support using existing evidence-based interventions among young people and high risk populations.
It follows official statistics released today by NHS Digital about smoking, drinking and drug use among young people. These figures show that six per cent of 11-15 year olds said they were offered NPS and one per cent said they had taken them in the last year.3 Office of National Statistics figures released last week reported 125 deaths from NPS, double that of the previous year.4 This longitudinal study about NPS was commissioned and funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), the nation’s largest funder of health and care research, and was recently published in the NIHR Journals Library.
The research leveraged data from 2,039 young people who were part of the larger Belfast Youth Development Study (BYDS), which tracked a group of young people from ages 11, and examined in detail how they used alcohol and drugs as they grew up.
Source: Queen's University Belfast, 21st August 2019
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