Which Drugs Are Most Popular at Each Festival? Study Breaks It Down
It’s tricky to get stats on how many people do drugs — it’s illegal, after all. Sometimes, people talk about doing drugs (or just about drugs) though, even on social media (which is, admittedly, inadvisable — think of your future employers!). Perhaps no place is as notorious for drug use as music festivals.
DrugAbuse.com decided to figure out how all these different factors intersect with a study of drug and alcohol mentions, by festival, on Instagram. To do this, researchers first gathered intel on how many Instagram posts mentioned one of the 15 festivals they analyzed (3,622,365).
From there, they looked at how many of those posts also mentioned or alluded to a controlled substance — by percentage, Marley Fest had the most mentions of drug use (pretty shocking…), and the KISS Country Chili Cook-Off had the most mentions of alcohol (which could have been inspired by the Brad Paisley hit of the same name — he headlined after all).
Below, find the top festivals by mention of each substance — pot seems to make a fairly weak showing across the board, but remember that this is measured only by what people are talking about on Instagram:
The one question not answered by the study was what percentage of the Instagram posts mentioning molly were simply captioned “Popped a molly/I’m sweatin’ ” (inquiring minds want to know).
