Celebrating drugs

One third of hit songs mention alcohol, drug use:

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 9 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.

via ccsa.ca