Listening to loud music linked with pot use, unsafe sex, study says
By Karen Kaplan
Warning: Music may be hazardous to your health.
It’s not just your hearing that’s at risk, according to a study out Monday in the June issue of the journal Pediatrics. Teens and young adults who listen to digital music players with ear buds are almost twice as likely as non-listeners to smoke pot, the study says. And those who attend concerts or frequent dance clubs are nearly six times as likely as homebodies to go on a binge-drinking bender.
These findings are based on survey results collected from 944 low-income students at two vocational schools in the Netherlands. The students ranged in age from 15 to 25, with an average age of 18. The study authors, public health experts in Rotterdam, focused on these kids because risky health behaviors are more common in this cohort, they wrote.
Risky music-listening behavior was defined as listening to music at 89 dBA for at least an hour per day, based on a report from the European Commission’s Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks. (dBA is short for decibel A-weighting, a measure of environmental noise.) That music exposure can cause noise-induced hearing loss, or NIHL; people with this condition often have “increased feelings of isolation, depression, loneliness, anger, and fear,” according to the study.
But that’s not where the health risks end. The researchers found that compared with young adults who listened to music responsibly, those who put themselves at risk with digital music players were:
* 1.99 times more likely to say they had used cannabis in the last four weeks;
* 1.19 times more likely to smoke cigarettes daily; and
* 1.10 times more likely to have sex without using a condom every time.
In addition, compared with the students with safe music-listening practices, those who put themselves at risk by attending noisy concerts and clubs were:
* 5.94 times more likely to have consumed five or more alcoholic drinks in a row at some point in the last four weeks;
* 2.03 times more likely to have sex without using a condom every time; and
* 1.12 times more likely to smoke cigarettes every day.
Interestingly, those who listened to too-loud live music were 43% less likely to report cannabis use in the last four weeks.
The researchers don’t say that loud music caused these students to graduate to other risky behaviors, only that there was a strong correlation between them. That could be useful for public health officials to know so they could design practical interventions, such as handing out condoms along with earplugs at concert venues, or by printing messages about alcohol abuse on concert ticket stubs, they suggested.
With regard to digital music players, the researchers noted that “music sounds better with cannabis use” and noted that manufacturers “should be encouraged to create a safer listening environments” by creating players that produce high-quality sound at lower dBA levels.
Take your pick of issues. Gaming causes real life violence, school kids should have the cops called on them when they misbehave in school, illegal drugs cause real life problems; the list seems endless. Here's a news flash. You can not protect people from life. Bad things happen without there being a cause that got them there.
You can get up out of bed in the morning, fall and break your neck. You wind up dead. It happens. The cure for this is personal responsibility. No parent can protect their child from life any more than they can protect themselves beyond reasonable care. Comic books do not cause violence. If a kid can not tell the difference between real life and a game with a reset to start over, his problem isn't caused by the game. He has other issues that need addressed. I learned to read with comic books and was encouraged to read them. I have no intention to go rob some bank, jump off a multistory building with the idea I can fly, or jump out in front of a bullet thinking it's going to bounce off my chest.
What the real issues here are, is that there is industries that think you shouldn't do these actions because it costs them money. Or someone somewhere is benefiting from things as they are and could benefit more if the laws were changed to be stricter. Making more laws against marijuana is not going to stop it's use, otherwise it would have long ago ceased. If you make laws against the will of the public, you wind up with a public that ignores them. Infringement is an excellent example of this. It is not more education that will cure the infringement nor is it stricter laws. According to surveys, almost none of the younger generation sees file sharing as having anything wrong with it. The law is out of frame with the real life experiences and examples. As such it will be done as all bad laws and ignored by the public. Prohibition speaks volumes for just such a model. It was ignored by the public at large, despite arrests, busts of businesses, or any type of educational format made. All it did was fuel the legal arm, the criminal element, and supply reasons for ever more harsher laws. In no way did it curtail the use of alcohol.
These types of busy bodies that think they know better how to live your life than you have continually made this mistake through out history. It is no different today than then and the results are the same as well.