Dawes Centre for Future Crime, University College London, London, UK.
Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science, University College London, London, UK.
Drug Alcohol Rev. 2024 Jan;43(1):56-74. doi: 10.1111/dar.13716. Epub 2023 Jul 31.
The sale of illicit drugs online has expanded to mainstream social media apps. These platforms provide access to a wide audience, especially children and adolescents. Research is in its infancy and scattered due to the multidisciplinary aspects of the phenomena.
We present a multidisciplinary systematic scoping review on the advertisement and sale of illicit drugs to young people. Peer-reviewed studies written in English, Spanish and French were searched for the period 2015 to 2022. We extracted data on users, drugs studied, rate of posts, terminology used and study methodology.
A total of 56 peer-reviewed papers were included. The analysis of these highlights the variety of drugs advertised and platforms used to do so. Various methodological designs were considered. Approaches to detecting illicit content were the focus of many studies as algorithms move from detecting drug-related keywords to drug selling behaviour. We found that on average, for the studies reviewed, 13 in 100 social media posts advertise illicit drugs. However, popular platforms used by adolescents are rarely studied.
Promotional content is increasing in sophistication to appeal to young people, shifting towards healthy, glamourous and seemingly legal depictions of drugs. Greater inter-disciplinary collaboration between computational and qualitative approaches are needed to comprehensively study the sale and advertisement of illegal drugs on social media across different platforms. This requires coordinated action from researchers, policy makers and service providers.
非法药物的在线销售已经扩展到主流社交媒体应用程序。这些平台为广大受众，尤其是儿童和青少年提供了获取途径。由于该现象涉及多学科方面，因此研究仍处于起步阶段且较为分散。
我们针对向年轻人宣传和销售非法药物这一现象进行了多学科系统范围的综述。检索了 2015 年至 2022 年间发表的英文、西班牙语和法语同行评议研究。我们提取了有关用户、研究药物、帖子数量、使用的术语和研究方法的数据。
共纳入 56 篇同行评议论文。这些分析突出了广告宣传的各种药物和用于宣传的平台。考虑了各种方法设计。许多研究的重点是检测非法内容的方法，因为算法从检测与毒品相关的关键字转移到了毒品销售行为。我们发现，在所审查的研究中，平均每 100 个社交媒体帖子中有 13 个宣传非法药物。然而，青少年常用的热门平台却很少受到研究关注。
宣传内容越来越复杂，以吸引年轻人，更多地转向健康、有魅力且看似合法的毒品描绘。需要计算和定性方法之间进行更大的跨学科合作，以全面研究不同平台上社交媒体上非法药物的销售和广告宣传。这需要研究人员、政策制定者和服务提供商采取协调行动。
