Drug Web Sites Provide Wrong Information

B O S T O N, Aug. 8 -- Internet surfers are far morelikely to come upon Web sites with wrong and potentiallydangerous information about illicit drug use than they are tofind more reliable, informed sites, a new study shows.

A study in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine foundthat popular Internet search engines tend to direct users tosites that appear to promote drug use and provide incorrect andeven dangerous information.

Often overlooked by the popular search engines are thoseWeb sites that provide reliable information on illegal drugs,including sites funded by the federal government, the studysaid.

Some 24 percent of college students use the Internet tofind information about illegal drugs, with some sites recording160,000 hits a day, researchers said.

Edward Boyer and two other doctors at Children's Hospitalin Boston conducted the survey, studying seven "partisan" sites"that promulgate information about illicit drugs."

"When we looked at fairly common illicit substances, wefound that serious errors were pretty easy to find," Boyer toldReuters.

"Not only do partisan Web sites condone drug use with itsattendant health risks, but any adverse effect arising fromillicit substances potentially would be mismanaged withpotentially lethal consequences."

Feds Overlooked?

For example, one promotes "cures" for poisoning frompsychedelic mushrooms such as ingesting carbon tetrachloride,which can destroy the liver.

By contrast, sites with reliable information, especiallythose funded by the federal government, are often ignored orgiven a low priority by popular search engines that rank sitesfor information on Ecstasy and other illegal drugs.

"We were stunned to find the federal government sites wereabsent from some searches entirely," even though the governmentis spending millions of dollars developing them, Boyer said.

One reason is that those creating government-sponsoredsites seem to "lack the technical expertise" to make themappear prominently in a search, he said.