DRUG WEB SITES PROVIDE HARMFUL INFORMATION - STUDY

BOSTON (Reuters) - Internet surfers are far more likely to come upon Web
sites with wrong and potentially dangerous information about illicit drug
use than they are to find more reliable, informed sites, a new study shows.

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

Often overlooked by the popular search engines are those Web sites that
provide reliable information on illegal drugs, including sites funded by
the federal government, the study said.

Some 24 percent of college students use the Internet to find information
about illegal drugs, with some sites recording 160,000 hits a day,
researchers said.

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

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

"Not only do partisan Web sites condone drug use with its attendant health
risks, but any adverse effect arising from illicit substances potentially
would be mismanaged with potentially lethal consequences."

FEDS OVERLOOKED?

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

By contrast, sites with reliable information, especially those funded by
the federal government, are often ignored or given a low priority by
popular search engines that rank sites for information on Ecstasy and other
illegal drugs.

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

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

For example, most Web sites use hidden keywords to help search engines flag
them. Home pages for sites that promote drug use contain up to 60 such
keywords.

But the home page for freevibe (http:/www.freevibe.com), with drug
information from the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign, had none.

In order to find freevibe in a search, consumers had to know to ask
specifically for "freevibe."

"In all searches, antidrug sites from the federal government failed to
appear as often as the partisan sites, which dominate the search results
when people are looking for information on illicit substances such as
Ecstasy, GHB, or 'psychedelic mushrooms,"' the researchers said.

GHB or gammahydroxybutyrate, is similar to Rohypnol the so-called date rape
drug, according to the National Clearinghouse for Alcohol and Drug Information.

"These data suggest that the U.S. government, despite extensive and costly
efforts, currently does not provide effective alternative sources of
information about drugs on the Web, where partisan sites still get the
attention of both search engines and users," they said.

The Office of National Drug Control Policy, which sponsors the freevibe
site, criticized the study and chastised the authors for failing to contact
the agency before putting out the letter.

"As far as I know, the people who wrote that letter never contacted this
office," said Jennifer Devallance, a spokeswoman for the agency.

She said there were more than 3,000 links around the Web to either freevibe
or The Anti-Drug, (http:/www.theantidrug.com), which targets parents.