QUESTIONS OVER WHETHER THE CLASSROOM CAN PROVIDE A CURE

Education Is Regarded As The Great Panacea For The Heroin Problem.

Policy makers from the Prime Minister, Mr John Howard, through to
Professor David Penington have pinpointed education as a vital
component of their otherwise different strategies to counter drug addiction.

But there is a big question mark over the state-funded $14.2million
drugs education program in Victorian schools: is it working? The
answer is no one knows because there has been no evaluation. Research
has, however, highlighted the links between truancy, school drop-out
rates, illiteracy and drug abuse, leading to a call for more effort to
help troubled youths stay at school.

Expulsion, the experts say, is the worst outcome for students caught
experimenting with drugs, and they were critical of Mr Howard's
encouragement for all schools to follow the ``zero tolerance'' example
of a Sydney principal who recently expelled nine girls for handling
marijuana.

The president of the Victorian Association of State Secondary
Principals, Mr Ted Brierley, said Mr Howard ``has no real
understanding of the issues ... we would think that if it's the first
time, it should be treated as a health issue and appropriate help given''.

Education extends beyond the classroom, and governments have also put
money into community programs. But what have they achieved? Not much,
according to the limited assessments that have been conducted. A
previously unreleased Turning Point Alcohol and Drug Centre evaluation
of the drug information booklet the State Government sent to all
households in 1997 at a cost of more than $1.5million, concluded ``the
campaign appears to have had limited impact''.

There is no doubting, however, that education campaigns aimed specifically
at the small
population of injecting drug users in Australia have been successful.
The best evidence for this is the low rate of AIDS infections that
have resulted through sharing syringes. The message not to share
needles and the decision to make free syringes widely available means
that in Australia since the mid-1980s, HIV prevalence has remained at
less than 5 per cent of injecting drug users, compared to up to 50 per
cent in some parts of the United States, which does not have an
official exchange program.

But in the wider community, the impact of drug education on preventing
drug abuse is dubious. Research on drug use among secondary students
confirms that school-based education strategies have so far failed to
stop youthful drug experimentation. In fact it's on the increase. The
1998 National Drug Strategy household survey found 51.1 per cent of
Australians aged 14 to 19 had tried an illicit drug (mostly marijuana)
up from 42.7 per cent on the 1995 survey.

Victorian policies were revised in 1995 to reflect a harm minimisation
approach in drug education lessons, finally ending a 30-year tradition
of ``just say no'' messages in schools.

The Education Department has directed all government schools to devise
their own drug education lessons, to acknowledge ``many students have
used, currently use and will use drugs'' and that the choice to use
``may not be within the control of teachers''.

A department spokeswoman said an evaluation of the new strategy was
under way, and that ``feedback from parents, teachers and principals
in relation to the harm minimisation approach has also been
overwhelmingly positive''.

But Dr Graeme Hawthorne, of Melbourne University's Centre for Health
Program Evaluation, said he was ``flummoxed'' to find there hadn't
been a single study applying harm minimisation to schools.

``All the research on harm minimisation has been in connection with
adults who have a drug problem. Whether or not that means that harm
minimisation is applicable to a school setting - where you're dealing
with people taking up drugs for the first or second or third time - I
think remains a totally open question, and it's obviously a totally
unresearched field. This is rather a shock,'' he said.

Research by Dr Hawthorne in the mid-1990s revealed strong links
between poor literacy skills and increased rates of tobacco use among
high school students.

``If we really are serious about our schools doing something about
students just starting out on their drug-taking lives, and we want to
reduce their recruitment to drugs like tobacco and alcohol - and we
know that alcohol and tobacco use is a predictor for later other drug
use - the best thing we could be doing is expanding literacy programs
to try to identify students who have got weak literacy and really
building on their skills,'' he said.

These concerns are reinforced by others who regard drug education
programs, however holistic, as unsatisfactory. The system now, they
say, is not reaching the teenagers most at risk - those wagging or
dropping out of school.

Professor Margaret Hamilton, the director of Turning Point, said
studies have found the same risk and protective factors apply to many
of the problems faced by young people, be it drug dependency, suicide,
juvenile crime or mental illness.

Addressing these requires a strong network of supports, from
ante-natal and post-natal care, through to parenting skills and school
support.

``The problem is,'' she said, ``you don't see quick returns so money
isn't readily available.''