DON'T TOY WITH DRUGS

The protection of childhood innocence is a sacred trust; parents and
teachers have a duty to defend the young against the evils of the adult
world - among the most harmful of which is the misuse of drugs. That duty is
best exercised by keeping children out of harm's way and giving them simple
rules and moral guidance; it is wrongly exercised by arming them with
knowledge beyond their years and encouraging them prematurely to make
judgements of their own.

But Jack Straw, the Home secretary, and his "drugs tsar", Keith Hallawell,
seem to think otherwise. Spelling out the facts to primary classes is to be
an integral part of a 10-year "war on drugs", outlined in a White Paper
yesterday. Mr Hallawell has spoken of "appropriate drugs education from the
age of five" : but young children do not need to know the difference of
effect between one drug and another, or the price on the street - any more
than they need to know about techniques of safe sex. They simply need to
know that they should never play with pills, just as they should never speak
to strange men.

To fill children's minds with information they cannot understand is to
corrupt them. By talking about illegal drugs in a matter-of-fact way,
teachers risk making them seem all too normal; by wrapping drugs education
in artful presentation, schools run the risk of glamorising the subject and
making it all the more intriguing. Inevitably, the task of drugs education
will fall to those teachers who are themselves most familiar with the topic,
and more likely to present drug abuse as a matter of adult choice rather
than outright evil.

Mr Hallawell has supported his proposal by claiming "there is no evidence …
that more knowledge encourages drug misuse". But it is clear, for example,
that emphasis on practical sex education, accompanied by free distribution
of condoms, encourages promiscuity - leading to more, rather than fewer,
teenage pregnancies. It is a failure of moral responsibility to say -
whether about sex or drugs - that children are bound to be tempted sooner or
later, and better forearmed so that they can minimise the risks if they
choose to indulge Children are best equipped against life's dangers not by
precocious knowledge of what is "safe", but by real understanding of what is
right and wrong. That will not be achieved by filling five-year-olds minds
with images of heroin and cocaine.