Illegal Leisure: Alcohol, Drugs and the Regulation of Modern Youth

Abstract

This chapter looks at the gradual reconstruction of the nature of leisure in adolescence and young adulthood and the increasing propensity for leisure to be packaged and purchased both through legal and illegal markets. There is no shortage of theoretical debate about the implications of postmodernity for growing up in the UK or Western Europe. Numerous persuasive commentaries looking at the increasingly lengthy and uncertain journey to adult citizenship (Furlong and Cartmel, 1997; Irwin, 1995) argue that marriage, parenthood and a confirmed career or occupation are increasingly deferred. Young Britons thus tend to remain in a semi-autonomous, semidependent or ‘unsettled’ phase until their mid-twenties (Chisholm and Bergeret, 1991). This period might be called post-adolescence (Jones, 1991) This one process in itself facilitates the development of a ‘new’ period when leisure, including illegal pleasures, are particularly prized. The purchase of leisure also affects not just adolescents but increasingly a clearly targeted niche children’s market, thus even pre-teens are being captured by this process. For the outgoing young person, leisure is increasingly constructed around the youth market of designer clothes and shoes, packaged music, fast food, and public entertainment of infinite variety from concerts to raves to holidays in the sun.