WRONG WAY TO STOP DRUG USE

The great flaw in the Government's new campaign to use "shock tactics" to
dissuade school pupils from taking illegal drugs is that children do not
accept that they will ever die.

Ask them, and they will tell you that everyone has to die one day. But they
do not really believe that it will happen to them, personally, until a time
so far in the future that it is not worth thinking or worrying about.

They may fantasise about dying young, in glamorous or squalid
circumstances. But death, as far as most children are concerned, is
something that happens to other people, not to them.

For that reason, we fear that it will do no good to show children Rachel's
Story, a 22-minute film which includes gruesome photographs of the dead
body of Rachel Whitear, who died of a heroin overdose.

No doubt pupils who see it will be shocked by the images, as the Government
intends. But we wonder whether it will affect their behaviour. Few, we
suspect, will make the imaginative leap to see themselves as Rachel.

The truth is that this Government (of which Stephen Byers is a member),
like its predecessors, has no idea how to dissuade young people from taking
dangerous drugs. It just wants to be seen to be trying.

We do not claim that we have the answer, either. But shock tactics have
failed before. We suspect that a straightforward, moral approach might be
more effective than showing yet more shocking film footage to a generation
brought up on Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.

In the short term, the simple message that taking drugs is wrong may
encourage some children to try them, just for the sake of defying
authority. But we suspect that it would discourage the great majority. At
the very least, it would give children a moral compass, by which to guide
their behaviour as they grow up.

"Non-judgmental" sex education has done nothing but excite children's
interest in sex. "Judgmental" anti-smoking campaigns have been shown to work.