Twitter, Facebook encourage drug abuse?

This week Columbia University's National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) in the US released a poll of more than 2,000 teens that found that spending time on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter can lead to smoking, alcohol, and drug abuse.

"Be afraid of Facebook, be very afraid," jokes The Huffington Post, citing the claims as "outrageous." "It's another correlational study in which the reader is obviously supposed to assume causality, a no-no in the world of studies," adds the Los Angeles Times. "At one time, public health experts thought that eating ice cream might cause polio; they noticed that the number of polio cases was higher in places with greater ice cream consumption."

The results of the survey showed that compared to teens who don't visit social networking sites daily, those who log on are five times more likely to use tobacco, three times more likely to drink alcohol, and twice as likely to smoke marijuana.

"But it's not the fact that teens visit social network sites that makes them more likely to abuse alcohol or other drugs," writes WebMD. "Instead, the issue seems to be what they view on those sites."

CASA reports that 40 percent of the teens interviewed said they saw photos on social media sites of their peers drunk, passed out, or using drugs, which CASA says is just bad news for any parent, and they hope the results of the survey might nudge parents to start monitoring what their child sees online. In the survey, which also interviewed 528 parents of teens, 64 percent said they didn't monitor social networking sites that their children visit.

"Parents need to monitor their kids with respect to social networking and the TV shows they watch, and know what their kids' lives are like," said CASA President Joseph Califano Jr.