Easily influenced (Image: Keith Brofsky/Stone/Getty)

PARENTS looking to steer their teens away from drugs may want to encourage them stay in bed longer. Lack of sleep seems to lead to increased drug use – not the other way around, as many researchers previously concluded – and this is likely to be a pattern of behaviour that teenagers acquire from their friends.

“Your sleep is going to influence my sleep and that will make me more likely to do drugs,” says Sara Mednick, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, who led the study.

Establishing whether one behaviour leads to another …