'YOUNGSTERS WANT HONESTY AND CONSISTENCY OF MESSAGE'

John Clare Talks To Drug Tsar Keith Hellawell

At first sight, a less autocratic "tsar" than Keith Hellawell, the
Government's anti-drugs co-ordinator, would be hard to imagine. Ask him what
advice he would give parents who discovered their children were using drugs,
and the first thing he says is: "Don't be judgemental."

"It's absolutely critical that children should feel able to engage with
their parents," he explains. "All the hundreds of youngsters I talk to, from
every sort of background, say they need their parents, they want to be able
to talk to them - even if their parents don't know as much about drugs as
they do. But many don't feel able to talk because they think they've been
judged before they've opened their mouths."

Sitting in his office a room of frankly tsarist proportions in a building
behind the Treasury Mr Hellawell, 57, is the carefully chosen, sharply
suited symbol of Tony Blair's personal commitment to "tackling drugs to
build a better Britain".

The part calls for a judicious blend of velvet and iron plus a discreet dash
of showmanship - a combination of qualities on which Mr Hellawell, a
smoothly articulate former chief constable with a law degree from London and
an MSc from Cranfield, has built his career.

His technique is to distance himself from anything that could be seen as a
hard line - but without necessarily deviating from it. So, for example, he
goes to great lengths to dismiss the "gateway" theory of cannabis - that
once you start smoking it you are almost bound to end up injecting heroin -
and then promptly embarks on an explanation of how cannabis is widely used
to come down from highs on "brown" - smoked heroin - which, in turn, leads
to heroin injecting.

Before you know it, he is talking about a "new injecting group, youngsters
who are achievers, from stable homes and in employment, who've come to it
through the recreational scene", and concluding: "So cannabis isn't OK."

As if that is not confusing enough, he adds: "But I've never argued that all
drugs are as bad as each other, that all drugs are going to kill you.
Youngsters want honesty, consistency of message, and they want that message
from somebody they can trust."

Earlier, I had put it to Mr Hellawell that lumping all drugs together made
it difficult to talk about them sensibly to young people, who saw clear
distinctions between them. He began by denying that he did any such thing
until I pointed to the passage in his first annual report, published last
week, in which he quoted current estimates of drug usage in three age
brackets from 11 to 24, including the striking statistic that one
16-year-old in two has at least experimented with drugs. Did not those
figures refer overwhelmingly, but not exclusively, to cannabis?

Having conceded the point, Mr Hellawell went on: "Yes, but I put targets
[for reducing consumption] on heroin and cocaine, but not on cannabis.
That's a fundamental shift - away from lumping them all together and
focusing on the drugs that cause the major harm. That's the whole basis of
our 10-year strategy.

"Young people certainly don't lump them together. They see hard drugs as
being for junkies. Cannabis use, on the other hand, has become normalised
regarded as almost totally acceptable, scarcely worthy of comment."

So if that was the case and he had set no target for reducing cannabis
consumption, what were young people to conclude? "I regard the normalisation
of cannabis as very dangerous indeed," Mr Hellawell replied - and that was
when he started talking about the connection between using cannabis and
injecting heroin.

The problem behind all this is that although cannabis is illegal, about two
million Britons - according to most estimates - use it or have used it
without apparently suffering the sort of effects that the law and Mr
Hellawell imply. It risks introducing an element of hypocrisy into drugs
education and makes the "honesty and consistency of message" he seeks
difficult to attain.

Another difficulty is finding a coherent middle way between what he calls
the "hang 'em and flog 'em approach" and "We know you're going to do it,
just look after yourself", both of which Mr Hellawell firmly rejects. He
says: "The message young people really need is, 'Just don't get involved'.

"We need to give them the reasons why they shouldn't get involved, warn them
of the pressures they'll come under to get involved, and acknowledge that if
they do get involved, well, it's up to them but at least they know the
consequences."

In case that sounds perilously close to "We know you're going to do it, just
look after yourself", he again goes for the panic button. "Young people who
go clubbing and take drugs need to know they're playing Russian roulette,"
he says. "They should be shown a revolver with a bullet in the chamber. They
should also know that one of the additives dealers cut heroin with is rat
poison because it opens up the blood vessels to get it going into the brain.
We need to tell them the facts dispassionately without preaching."

Fearing, perhaps, that he has gone too far, he immediately adds that only a
tiny minority of young people will ever become involved with hard drugs and
that the great majority will simply "flirt" with cannabis and that it is
therefore a "manageable issue".

Talking about how parents and teachers can help children resist drugs, Mr
Hellawell seems on much surer ground. He says his advice about not being
judgemental stems from the experience of parents whose children have died
from drugs and told him subsequently of their guilt about how they had dealt
with the issue when it first arose.

"They'd adopted the hard line approach," he explains.

"They'd said, 'You're not bringing drugs into this house, and if you do
you're not my child'. They'd created an atmosphere in which their children
couldn't engage with them, and the guilt over 'I wish I'd talked to them' is
enormous."

So his advice to parents and teachers is this. "The first thing to do is to
learn more and understand more about drugs so that you feel confident
talking about them. Next, no matter how uncomfortable you are with the
subject, do ask children about it. Ask them open questions - not, 'Have you
ever taken drugs?' but, 'Tell me about the drug scene. What do you know
about drugs? Do your friends take drugs?'

"Remember, if the child admits to being involved with drugs, the likelihood
of him or her dying through experimentation, or getting deeply involved and
ending up an addict, is slight. Many parents are frightened about this, but
they've got to put it into context."

Which, though, of the various scenarios he has sketched constitutes the
context? And what about drugs education? Which, if any, of the plethora of
approaches to be found in schools actually works? The answer is as sobering
as the discovery that all the Government's much-trumpeted targets are
effectively meaningless because they are based on reducing what is unknown.

"We're very light on information about the effectiveness of drugs education
programmes," Mr Hellawell says carefully. "We can't say yet what the ideal
programme is."

After 18 months in the job, he still has a mountain to climb - as do the
rest of us.