Author: John Carter

The 1960s, music and drugs: From grass roots to global counterculture

In 1965 “the first Race Relations Act outlawed racial discrimination and set up the Race Relations Board (R.R.B) to investigate complaints”, largely reflecting the sense of equality the counterculture stood for. But radical, liberalizing legislation such as this was not just prominent in England. In America the Civil Rights Movement pressed for equality and in 1964 Martin Luther King led a march 250,000 strong that ultimately led to the signing of the Civil Rights Act in the same year. The act “banned discriminatory practices in employment and ended segregation in public places”. This declaration of equality must be viewed as an important positive effect of the counterculture. The anti-war/ pro-peace sentiment of the decade is obviously reflected in the music that was produced.

Check out 35 of our favorite odes, warnings, and meditations about music’s old companion, drugs. This section collects any data citations, data availability statements, or supplementary materials included in this article. Cocaine street price data in the US from 2000 to 2016, adjusted for purity and inflation, was obtained from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime26.

Studies and Research

The fitted model and 2018 lyrics data about cocaine were used to project 2018, 2019, and 2020 incidence of cocaine and cocaine overdose mortality assuming a linear rate of growth of cocaine prevalence in song lyrics. It should be known though that even by 1966 “there was no acid sub culture in Britain”,showing, uptake of the drug was not instantaneous. It has then been revealed that LSD, whilst not immediately prevalent at the start of the decade, was in use. It was the adoption in the mid 1960s by mainstream musicians that gradually made the drug more available. To provide further validation of our lag-time results, we performed cross-correlation tests between lyrics and cocaine use and lyrics and deaths at varying lags to evaluate time-delayed associations.

Inferring China’s excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic using online mourning and funeral search volume

Analytical steps were included in the methodology to remove potential spurious correlations but this is not enough to deem our results as causal. Cocaine street price was included in the model to control for economic fluctuations that would impact purchasing behaviors and initiation of drug use25. Further tests on the differenced series confirmed autocorrelations were no longer present after first-order differentiation. For centuries, musicians have used drugs to enhance creativity and listeners have used drugs to heighten the pleasure created by music. The relationship between drugs and music is also reflected in lyrics and in the way these lyrics were composed by musicians, some of whom were undoubtedly influenced by the copious amounts of heroin, cocaine and “reefer” they consumed, as their songs sometimes reveal. In Britain psychedelic pioneers created music that was steeped in whimsy and surrealism, less aggressive and minimalist than their American counterparts.

psychedelic rock

In addition to being a measurement tool to estimate cocaine epidemiology, media itself can influence public perceptions of drug use and lead to increased drug use at the population level. Therefore, music about cocaine may not only provide an early signal of cocaine-related behaviors, but it could also act as an exposure that encourages the use of cocaine. Our study did not test the potential dynamic and cyclical relationship between cocaine lyrics and patterns of cocaine use. While cocaine mortality did not appear to estimate future cocaine mentions in song lyrics, further investigation into the influence of cocaine use on song lyrics is warranted.

Most Popular

Additionally, new slang terminology for drugs in music lyrics could indicate a new generation of cocaine users and a surge in under-detected use. Future studies should conduct a deeper investigation into lyrics about cocaine and other substances, with particular focus on how these messages may shape cultural perceptions and behaviors toward drug use. Given the wide audience of popular music, popular music artists should consider the potential influence of their lyrics on the drug epidemic impacting today’s youth.

In this study, we were only able to conduct analyses at the yearly level and not more granularly.
Given the wide audience of popular music, popular music artists should consider the potential influence of their lyrics on the drug epidemic impacting today’s youth.
Additionally, new slang terminology for drugs in music lyrics could indicate a new generation of cocaine users and a surge in under-detected use.
If you ask the casual music fan which genres are more likely to bring up recreational substance use, hip-hop or contemporary electronic music are likely to be the most common answers.
In a study ranking the danger of drugs6, cocaine received the highest harm ratings and notably scored highest in the “social harm” category.

J.S.B. helped secure funding for this study, assisted in the design, and supervised the project and supported the interpretation of the study findings. All authors contributed substantially to the acquisition, analysis, interpretation, critical revision, and are accountable for all accuracy and integrity of the work. Thanks Malcolm Mitchell for the introduction to understanding the deeper meaning of music lyrics. Report funding by the National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health (R01LM010812). Music and recreational substance abuse share a historic bond going back generations before the first fan was able to purchase a recording. History recounts countless examples of hymns sung by sailors celebrating the idea of drinking and other questionable activities.

Cocaine follows at 22 percent, beating out acid, pills, methamphetamines, heroin, and ecstasy. Fauve, a Swiss musician, and singer, tops the “pills” category by suggesting their use 67 times. Out of eight categories, country leads the way with 1.6 mentions per song on average, followed closely by jazz and pop music. Hip-hop actually falls in the last place at less than 1.3 mentions behind folk, challenging the assumption that all rappers are lyrical drug peddlers. People tend to form peer groups with those who share their own cultural preferences, which may be symbolised through interlinked musical and substance choices. Although there are some obvious synergies between some music and specific drugs, such as electronic dance music and ecstasy, other links have developed in less obvious ways.

Musician Drug Reference Awards

A standard epidemiological method for identifying relationships between time series is distributed lag regression43,44. In this framework, the dependent variable is regressed on delayed (or lagged) instances of the independent variable. This practice is commonly used in economics42 and has been applied to epidemiological research41 in order to express associations that change over time43. In our study, the dependent variable was cocaine mortality or cocaine use incidence and the independent variable was cocaine mentions in song lyrics.

Yearly counts of cocaine mentions in song lyrics were obtained from Lyrics.com, the largest known database for references to song lyrical information with keyword search37. A programmatic code was written to query each individual slang term to obtain the count of songs that mentioned that term each year. Slang term counts were summed to obtain the total mentions of unique slang terms per year. To account for variation in song volume over time, we transformed counts of cocaine mentions into a ratio of relative prevalence by dividing mentions of cocaine terms by mentions of “love”.