IT'S TIME TO GROW UP ABOUT KIDS AND DRUGS

THE expulsion of nine students from an exclusive girls' school in
Sydney, the Prime Minister's endorsement of the act, and some
principals calling for random urine testing (often referred to as
``jar wars'') suggest it is time to rethink our ideas on how to
effectively tackle the realities of teenage substance abuse.

It is painfully obvious to many researchers, policy makers as well as
the coal-face workers with young people in health, welfare and
education that the ``war on drugs'' has been lost and that a different
approach is needed. A proportion of the PM's extra $100 million
announced at the Premiers' Conference is supposed to be spent on drug
education, and those responsible for deciding how to spend this money
would do well to reflect on the reasons for the ineffective results so
far.

Traditional school drug programs have been based on a series of
untenable assumptions, namely that adolescents who dabble must be
somehow lacking in knowledge, skills or self-esteem and that their
experimentation is abnormal, even pathological.

An alternative line of attack, components of which may be seen in the
Victorian Government's three-year drug-education strategy, Turning the
Tide, sees experimentation with drugs as normative behavior. This
philosophy acknowledges that drug use in young people is often
transient but nevertheless carries certain risks. It recognises that
young people use for many reasons, and that if we cannot persuade the
users to stop immediately, we can at least try to help them stay
healthy until they do.

Harm-minimisation drug education tries to educate young people
``about'' rather than ``against'' drugs. It is non-judgmental and
respects the right of young people to make their own decisions.

Someone needs to explain to the Prime Minister that no amount of drug
testing, surveillance cameras, sniffer dogs or expulsions will ever
achieve a drug-free school community. Drug use in young people is a
complex phenomenon, the end of a journey that may have begun in a
variety of places, including family discord, truancy or poverty. A
strategic response must acknowledge this complexity and be
multi-faceted, integrated, coordinated and sustained. It must be based
on truth, not myth.

The challenge that has eluded the National Advisory Committee on
School Drug Education so far is to gain a national consensus on the
role and to be honest about the limitations of school-based prevention
programs. Part of this task will be to communicate what are the
realistic expectations of drug education in schools, namely that it
should focus on equipping young people with the skills, knowledge and
strategies for living in a drug-using society. This includes a basic
understanding of the pharmacology of drugs, their effects, their harms
and how to avoid them. This much, drug education should be able to
do.

Although the assumption underlying this latest call for more education
seems to be that the objective must be to eliminate drug use in
schools, experience suggests that young people will continue to
experiment with or use drugs.

The answer lies in a recognition that there are three key agents of
socialisation in the lives of young people: school, family and peers.
If we can get all three to send a consistent harm-minimisation message
about drugs, and at the same time work toward providing young
Australians with environments in which they can grow up feeling safe,
valued and listened to, then maybe we can reduce the harms.