PM'S ADVISER DEFENDS ANTI-DRUGS PUBLICATION

The Federal Government's chief drugs adviser, Salvation Army Major
Brian Watters, has defended changes made to toughen an anti-drugs
booklet for parents.

Substantial changes reportedly shift the booklet's approach from
educational to authoritarian.

The booklet will be mailed to one million households this
month.

Prime Minister John Howard's office told ABC Radio that the government
took responsibility for the campaign and it was normal for officials
to make changes.

Major Watters, the National Council on Drugs chairman, said the
booklet went through several drafts, with detailed statistics dropped.

"The booklet hasn't been rewritten," he said. "The drafts have been
amended to respond to what the committee felt were the weaknesses and
what the research showed. When families want a booklet to advise them
how to respond to the drug menace in their community and how it might
affect their kids, they don't want to wade through pages of statistics.

"There's been no change or radical difference to what was originally
proposed, that this thing should be a booklet focusing on families and
encouraging them to do those things that are believed to be
preventative."

But another member of the National Council on Drugs reference group,
Tony Trimingham, was concerned about the changes.

"If we want to be credible with teenagers and young people using
drugs, we have to listen to them, we have to accept that their world's
a different one from the one that we grew up in," he told ABC Radio.

Mr Trimingham said communication between parents and children had not
been encouraged.

"For instance, this one sentence that I was told about says you tell
your teenagers that they've made bad decisions if they're using
drugs," he said. "I would rather have an approach which questions why
they made the decision, (how) they benefited by that decision and what
they think of the fact that they're now using drugs."

He said the booklet covered illegal drugs but not cigarettes or
alcohol.

Federal Opposition health spokeswoman Jenny Macklin said the Liberal
Party should pick up the bill if it wanted to promote the agenda of
hardline drug-abstinence groups.

"A public campaign using substantial public funding should be based on
the best expert advice about what will work. Parents want to know what
the experts recommend, not what John Howard's personal views are."