A DIFFERENT KIND OF DRUG WAR

In B.C. Schools, Students Aren't Necessarily Learning 'Just Say No.'
Not Everyone Is Happy By The Change

GIBSONS-- When the Drug Fight Night comes and 50-odd young families pour
into the Cedar Grove elementary gymnasium, it looks at first as though
Kathy Morrison has won.

For about five years now, Morrison and her troupe of teenage hip-hop
dancers and basketball players have been "drug-proofing" Sunshine Coast
school kids with a flashy show and a simple yet time-tested message: Say NO
to drugs.

And as the hip-hop dancers and the strutting ball players entertain, cajole
and scare the assembled pre-teens to swear to abstinence, the parents nod
and smile and clap in support.

But in the back of the gym, two young women with a different agenda quietly
lay out pamphlets of what they call "reality-based" drug information. These
two women, volunteers with a publicly funded group called the Higher
Knowledge Network, are part of a growing movement in drug education.

They say many kids will experiment with drugs and alcohol no matter what
they're told, and it's no coincidence their motto is "Just Say Know." If
you use drugs, they tell kids, here's how to keep from serious harm.

On this night, the two women crash Morrison's party for only a few minutes
before they're told to cease and desist.

But before they pack up, one of them, a groovy-looking, smiley woman who
sometimes wears a thick green choker and puts her hair in Princess Leia
buns, foists a hand-lettered sign on the ladies at the parent committee
candy counter.

"Sugar is a drug too," it taunts.

Across Canada, abstinence-based drug education programs like Morrison's are
slowly giving way to so-called "harm reduction" programs.

"I think people are finally realizing that harm reduction doesn't have to
be a bad thing," says Andrea Stevens Lavigne, the head of youth prevention
programs for Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

"There's been more of that approach in the last few years than ever before."

Doug McCall, the Surrey-based executive director of the Canadian
Association for School Health, says educators are turning away from the
scare tactics of the "Just Say No" message toward drug education programs
that emphasize decision making, lifestyle choices and honest information
about drugs: programs that encourage kids to abstain but provide a backup
in case they don't.

Both McCall and Stevens Lavigne point to a message so effective and so
ubiquitous that it has become part of mass culture, even if we don't often
remember that it is also a classic of harm reduction: we no longer tell
teens 'Don't Drink.' We tell them 'Don't Drink & Drive.'

Not that harm reduction doesn't ruffle a few feathers.

Morrison, who describes herself as "heavy-set, grandma-looking," started
Help Encourage Awareness Training, or HEAT, five years ago. (It was
initially known as DARE, but later changed its name.)

At first, she says, the community welcomed her program's message. But in
some quarters, she complains, the welcome has worn thin.

"The schools had to decide was it going to be us or them," Morrison says,
"them" being the Higher Knowledge Network.

"I thought that the premise of abstinence for under-13-year-olds was a done
deal, a no-brainer, who could debate that?" she laughs. Then her voice
vaults half an octave to indignation.

"But on the Sunshine Coast I think we have enough parents who are involved
in the grow-op industry, we have enough who are doing it themselves, we
have -- I don't know what is different about this district -- I'm trying to
put my finger on it. But we had opposition."

Morrison, a mother of four, a grandmother, and a substitute teacher, might
be overstating things. If you count the Drug Fight Night late last month,
HEAT gave its high-octane presentation this past year to students at all
but one Gibsons elementary school.

The Higher Knowledge Network, in spite of its efforts, has not been allowed
so far to give presentations at even one elementary school, though it is
active in high schools and recently hosted an all-ages dance that
reportedly drew a healthy contingent of the pre-teen set.

HEAT is not the Sunshine Coast's only bulwark against drugs, either. B.C.
school kids get drug education as part of their regular curriculum.
Morrison says, too, that kids are as receptive as ever to her message that
it's cool to refuse drugs.

But she does have opposition.

Sandra Karpetas, 25, the young woman in the green choker, and Ainsley Dyck,
a 26-year-old with chunky blonde hair who works as a job counsellor when
she's not volunteering with the Higher Knowledge Network, take the Don't
Drink & Drive message one step farther.

They started the group last summer with a simple premise, that abstinence
- -- from drugs, from alcohol and from sex -- is realistic for some youth,
but not for most.

"People are going to be doing drugs -- people will be doing drugs until
time infinitum," Dyck says recently over lunch on a patio in downtown
Sechelt. "It's just going to go and go and go. And so what can we do? Well,
probably the best thing we can do is just make sure that people are as
smart as possible, you know? As informed as possible."

In other words, they won't tell kids what to do, but if the kids choose to
do drugs, the network can tell them how to keep from getting hurt.

So the group started getting its message out. The network raised money,
from local businesses and from the Chatelech-Sechelt Community School, a
provincially funded community development organization. The school fronted
money for network staff to attend conferences and for a mobile outreach and
chill-out centre in the form of a Smurf-blue school bus.

The network wrote its own literature on the most common drugs on the Coast
and had the regional health board check it for accuracy.

Dyck and Karpetas and a bevy of volunteers began approaching local
community organizations, parent advisory councils and school administrators.

One high school, Chatelech in Sechelt, invited the group to two of its
dances, where volunteers fielded questions about sex and drugs and alcohol
and offered advice on how to stay out of danger.

The network met with the parents' council at Gibsons' Elphinstone high
school, which has not yet decided whether to recommend inviting the group.

The network volunteers began meeting with elementary school parents'
councils as well, introducing themselves and their approach and requesting
permission to come to the schools.

So far, none have agreed, Dyck says.

And the network began holding parties where network volunteers could offer
advice and support, as well as contaminant testing of party drugs such as
Ecstasy.

Kathy Morrison's group got its start out of tragedy. Morrison used to
organize three-on-three basketball for Gibsons locals as a way to keep them
out of trouble. In 1995, one of her players, a popular student at
Elphinstone, took a hit of acid and hanged himself out in front of Cedar Grove.

Morrison and the boy's friends wanted to do something. Not long after the
suicide, Morrison and her husband were visiting a friend in Washington
State who had run the popular DARE program for the local police force.

DARE, taught by uniformed officers to Grade 5 students, had been born of
Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign and was the most widely used
anti-drug program in the U.S. But at the time, researchers and federal
officials began challenging the program's effectiveness.

(That debate continues. After years of standing fast, the head of DARE
recently acknowledged there is little evidence that the program works and
announced major changes to its curriculum. Here in Canada, the program is
still funded by RCMP and municipal forces and taught to elementary children
across B.C.)

Then DARE lost funding in the U.S.

So Morrison's friend, left with armloads of DARE paraphernalia he could not
use, passed it on: T-shirts, stickers, literature, the works. DARE's
Sunshine Coast incarnation offered basketball coaching and professional
dance instruction for teens, who would in turn take their skills, their
role-model status and their drug-free message to elementary school kids.

The message, as outlined in the training manuals given to HEAT coaches, was
crystal clear: Drugs will hurt you. Period.

The manual provides verbatim testimonials from unnamed drug addicts. Week
one comes courtesy of an unnamed pot-head the manual calls "a 16-year-old guy."

"I wish I only did drugs on the weekends but now I have to do them every
day," it says. "Sometimes I feel like my eyes are going to explode.... I'm
afraid I'm going to die."

Another 16-year-old guy says, "People who don't do drugs don't accept you.
You grow apart from your family. Me doing drugs is putting my family
through torture."

In week two, one of the unnamed users, this one a
six-foot-two-and-a-half-inch basketball player, says: "Because of drugs my
sister has to move to Vancouver Island, and I had to move to a foster home.
We can't live with our mother. I wish everything had been different for my
family. When you're smoking a joint it makes you do stupid things like
suicidal stuff."

Week four ups the ante. "I've seen nasty things," says the week's nameless
example. "I smoked rock for a year ... was arrested with assault when I was
16 and got out of jail when I was 17. My cellmate was gay."

With such conflicting views of drug use -- one permissive, one dire and
absolute -- it's no wonder the groups don't get along. Morrison, speaking
in a way that seems intended to convey her disdain at having to snipe, will
tell you quietly that police were called out to one of the network's
parties in Pender Harbour. (True, but only because of beer-drinking teens
who were not connected with the event, Dyck says.)

In turn, Dyck, though professing a willingness to get along, says some of
Morrison's coaches use drugs (Not true, says Morrison, who asserts that she
would know if it were.)

If you ask the experts, though, the intended target of each group's
efforts, Sunshine Coast kids, would be better off if HEAT and the Higher
Knowledge Network could cooperate.

Des Sjoquist, superintendent of the Sunshine Coast school district, doesn't
try to hide his frustration with the warring sides. He says he supports the
abstinence message, but then he supports harm reduction as well.

Sjoquist says the two sides have to recognize that no single approach works
for any single group of kids. He says he'd like to see different messages
for different age and risk groups; most young kids probably don't need to
learn harm reduction for heroin or crack, he says; and many older kids find
the abstinence message unrealistic.

"I don't think the two of them have to be in conflict," he says.

"They're pretty dug in in their thinking, but for the school district what
I'd like to see is you get the message out to as many kids in as many ways
as you can."

Dr. Paul Martiquet, chief medical health officer on the coast, gets squirmy
when asked which approach he prefers. "I take a harm reduction approach,
harm reduction," he says, laughing nervously.

"Please don't pit us against abstinence. Abstinence has its place. But if
you're going to bank your money on something, it's harm reduction that's
going to be the most cost effective. It's going to reach the most people
with the limited resources we have, period. And I hate to tell you, it's
not marijuana use that's the biggest problem, it's going to be tobacco and
alcohol."

Back at the Drug Fight Night, some of the parents seem to take an equally
complicated view.

Paul Ormiston, a single father with a 12-year-old boy and a 10-year-old
girl, says he likes the HEAT message. "It's a good idea, it's a really good
idea," he says. Then, as he looks over at Dyck and Karpetas' display and is
told of their harm-reduction approach, he nods. "It's not going to hurt,"
he says.

Same with Jennifer and John Rainer, who look like a typical suburban
couple, he in a striped golf shirt and sneakers, she in a denim skirt and
white T-shirt.

The Rainers say they brought their three kids, Cassidy, 5, Mitchell, 10 and
Tyler, 16, because they want the two youngest to stay drug-free. They
freely acknowledge that Tyler already smokes pot and drinks beer from time
to time. Everybody on the coast smokes, Tyler says, and John admits he's
not perfect either.

When asked if he smoked marijuana as a kid, John says "Yeah. Still do."

"I think first you have to drill it into them not to use it, but you have
to be realistic that they're going to be hit with a situation sooner or
later where they may try it," Jennifer says. "Then you have to try and
teach them the limits and try and scare the hell out of them."

Whatever happens, HEAT and the Higher Knowledge Network probably won't be
doing double-bills on the Sunshine Coast anytime soon. Morrison says the
network is welcome to come to HEAT events, so long as its volunteers sign
the same form that her volunteers sign: a pledge that they will remain
drug-free and will abstain from immoral conduct. In effect, it's not much
of an offer for a group that steadfastly espouses a non-judgmental view of
drugs.

Yet to Morrison, whose message is abstinence or bust, it's the bottom line.

"It's possible," she says, pointing to snapshots of her smiling HEAT
volunteers as evidence. "And it's what the parents want, it's what the
teachers want, it's what the principals want -- it's what the kids
themselves want. I ask, 'How many of you guys plan to be drug users in high
school?' and no hands go up. 'How many of you plan to fight drug use in
your life, to avoid it, to learn to say no?' Sea of hands," she says.

"Nobody wants to be a drug user."