Drug Abuse

 

 

Pubdate: Thu, 5 Mar 2009

Source: Economist, The (UK)

Copyright: 2009 The Economist Newspaper Limited

Contact: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Website: http://www.economist.com/

 

 

Drug Education

 

IN AMERICA, LESSONS LEARNED

 

But Efforts to Warn People Off Drugs Are Still Too Timid

 

HIS memories are addled, but the young member of Cocaine Anonymous

can just about recall his formal drug education. When he was about

11, he says, a police officer made several visits to his school to

give warning of the dangers posed by illicit substances. Although he

remembers thinking the cop was "something of a Dudley-Do-Right" he

agreed with him that drugs were best avoided. He recalls no further

lessons. By his late teens he was addicted to crack cocaine and

methamphetamine.

 

By far the best way of reducing the harm that drugs can do is to

convince people not to take them. Spraying crops, seizing shipments

and arresting dealers can drive up prices and create temporary

shortages. But it does not stop drug use. Addicts simply pay more for

crummier product or switch to other, often more harmful, substances.

Cocaine-takers may move to powder amphetamine or crystal meth; heroin

addicts experiment with oxycodone. "It's like a water-bed. Push down

in one place and another drug pops up," says Rod Skager, who surveys

teenagers' drug-taking for the California state government.

 

In the late 1980s cocaine-taking fell steeply among 12th-grade

pupils--that is, 17- and 18-year-olds--according to the University of

Michigan's long-running Monitoring the Future survey. Those teenagers

reported that the drug was more available than ever. They had simply

decided not to take it on the grounds that it was harmful. The same

thing happened with ecstasy earlier in this decade. Given the strong

link between perceptions of harm and use, it is a bad sign that

attitudes to cocaine are again becoming rather relaxed.

 

Most attempts to reduce drug demand in America are aimed at 11- to

14-year-olds. The principle is that children should be reached while

they are still fairly pliable and before they begin to take

drugs--not just the hard stuff but alcohol, marijuana and tobacco.

The hope is that they will develop a broad aversion to harmful

substances that will stay with them through their late teens and

early 20s, when drug use peaks. Only when an immensely damaging drug

emerges suddenly, as crystal meth did in some western states a few

years ago, are concerted efforts made to communicate with older teenagers.

 

Until recently the dominant approach was Drug Avoidance Resistance

Education (DARE), a programme developed in Los Angeles in 1983 and

quickly exported to the rest of America. Cops would arrive in

schools, sometimes driving cars confiscated from drug-dealers, and

tell 11- and 12-year-olds about the dangers of illicit substances.

They drew little or no distinction between marijuana and

methamphetamine. Teachers liked DARE because they felt uncomfortable

tackling the topic themselves, and because they got a break. Parents

liked it because they felt their children would listen to police officers.

 

Unfortunately, they did not. A string of academic studies labelled

DARE pointless at best. Some academics--and former drug-takers--argue

that efforts to scare young children about drugs that they may not

have heard of are actually counter-productive. "They're a challenge,"

says Taylor, a Los Angeles native who is recovering from an addiction

to crack cocaine and heroin. The federal government opted not to pay

for the programme. It survives (DARE claims it is still used in 72%

of America's school districts), but in an altered form. It has even

been dropped by the Los Angeles school district, where it began.

 

The new approach to drug education, reflected in the remodelled DARE,

is more oblique. By means of role-playing, cops and teachers try to

provide children with the confidence to resist pressures of all

kinds, from drugs to internet bullying. Rather than telling children

that drugs are dangerous, teachers assure them that they are rare.

Drugs are no longer treated as a unique, self-contained threat--which

indeed they are often not. "Kids do not normally walk in with a drug

problem who do not have other problems," says Lori Vollandt, who

co-ordinates health programmes in Los Angeles' schools.

 

The new programmes are mostly intended to reduce alcohol, marijuana

and tobacco use, and are evaluated in those terms. There is a good

reason for that. Because they are so widespread, the total harm

caused to teenagers by alcohol and tobacco is much greater than the

total harm caused by harder drugs. There is also a less good reason.

Educators worry about the "boomerang effect", in which talk about

drugs feeds curiosity about them.

 

The success of the campaign against methamphetamine suggests the

boomerang effect is overdone, at least for older teenagers. Meth is

an old drug that suddenly became popular again in the late 1990s. It

is generally made by cooking ammonia, lithium and pseudoephedrine, a

decongestant. The manufacturing process is extremely dangerous and

the finished product hardly safer. Faced with an epidemic, Montana

and other western states rolled out advertising campaigns. But rather

than emphasise the drug's addictiveness and long-term effects on the

brain, as earlier anti-drug campaigns had done, these pointed out

that meth users often had rotten teeth. It worked: in the past five

years attitudes to the drug have hardened and use has dropped steeply.

 

Even greater success has been achieved against tobacco. Since the

mid-1990s, the proportion of 12th-grade pupils who believe smoking a

packet or two of cigarettes a day carries a great risk has risen by

about ten percentage points. Regular puffing on cigarettes is now

thought much more dangerous than occasionally smoking crack.

 

There are several reasons for this. Hollywood has virtually stopped

glamorising cigarettes. Executives have been shamed and smokers

ostracised. But a big reason is that the people who create

anti-tobacco ads have refined their messages. They now know, for

example, that warnings about long-term health effects do not scare

teenagers. The long-term is too far off. Pointing out that

second-hand smoke can harm babies turns out to work. So do ads

suggesting that non-smokers are more popular.

 

It may seem odd that the campaign against tobacco, a legal drug, has

displayed so much more elan than the war on illegal drugs. Yet this

is natural. Making a drug illegal may discourage some people from

taking it, but it also discourages frank conversation and clear

thinking. It is much easier to attack something if it is brought into

the light.

_______________________________________________

Theharderstuff mailing list

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

http://mail.psychedelic-library.org/mailman/listinfo/theharderstuff