TEENAGE KICKS IN THE COUNTRYSIDE

There's no youth club, the nearest town is 20 miles away, and you can't go
to the pub because your parents are there. So what do you do? Pot, magic
mushrooms and LSD, mainly ...

Jamie Wilson and Duncan Campbell on how rural teenagers have outstripped
their urban contemporaries in drug use

At the age of 14, May, who lives in a remote rural village in Devon, and a
group of her friends were expelled from the Girl Guides for 'unruly
behaviour'. They soon discovered there were other ways to fill the long
summer nights than studying for their handiwork badges. "Living in a
village with one pub, a village hall, a Spar shop and a postbox, what else
is there to do five nights a week and at weekends?" she says.

She can clearly remember the first time she tried something more
immediately stimulating than the Baden-Powells had in mind for British
youth. "A friend of mine from school had some pot and we went back to her
house and smoked it," she says. "I remember just giggling for about two
hours and then walking round the village feeling a bit strange." Boredom
appears to have been the main driving force behind her and her friends'
drug-taking. School lasted from nine till four but there was little to do
after that. Deep in the heart of rural Devon, the village is more than 20
miles from the nearest large town. It's a long way for a 14-year-old to go
to find entertainment, especially if her parents tired swiftly of being
used as a taxi service; public transport is both expensive and irregular.

"What else were we meant to do? You couldn't go to the pub because the
chances are your parents would be there. You can't buy a drink from the
shop because you've grown up around the people behind the counter and they
know your age. No youth club, pub out of bounds, and the parents of the
younger kids didn't like us hanging out in the kiddies' play area. So we
would go down to a recreation field on the outskirts of the village and get
stoned." Getting hold of the drugs was no problem. Somebody would be
dispatched to one of the towns on a Saturday afternoon to pick some up, or
they would buy drugs from an older brother or sister who knew where to get
hold of them. Paying for the drugs was no problem either.

"Some people had what I guess you would call illegal part-time jobs, others
just borrowed money from their parents. I mean, £2.50 for an LSD tab split
between two isn't exactly a lot of money for an evening out, even for
a14-year-old.

"Pot, magic mushrooms and LSD are the drugs we did mostly, and occasionally
a bit of speed when it came into the village." She is just one of tens of
thousands of young people in rural areas who this week surfaced in a survey
as taking drugs more frequently than their contemporaries in the cities.
The perception among urban people of the rural teenager is that they are
like something out of Cider With Rosie - a slightly backward bunch dressed
in Worzel Gummidge rags whose worst crime is to over-indulge in scrumpy
occasionally. But the report - Young People and Drugs in 1998, produced by
the Schools Health Education Unit - shows that nearly a third of 14- and
15-year-olds in rural regions have had some experience of drugs.

By contrast, the figure for their counterparts in the supposedly
needle-strewn streets on Britain's cities is nearly 10 per cent lower.

Jenny Lockwood is project manager for Turning Point in Worcestershire, a
county lying in the shadow of the Malvern hills. With its market gardens,
rolling fields and pretty little villages nestled deep in the countryside,
it is as far removed from the popular image of squalid, drug-infested
inner-city backstreets as it is possible to get.

"Most parents are stunned," she says. "Previously the worst thing they
could imagine was their child being thrown from a horse. They associate
drug use with high unemployment and different social strata from their own.
But suddenly they find that their children are involved in drugs and they
are shocked and worried and don't understand. They imagine they have
protected their children by living in the countryside. But drug use knows
no boundaries."

The wide variety of drugs available is also a worrying factor: "You name it
and it's around. Cannabis, amphetamines, LSD and Ecstasy mainly, but we've
also seen heroin and cocaine."

Some rural teenagers are spending large amounts of money on drugs. "I had a
17-year-old from one of the small villages in the area come in a few weeks
ago. She and a friend had actually gone out and got a bank loan to buy £200
of Ecstasy. They were going to sell it to their friends but ended up using
it all themselves."

"It's not a surprise," Mike Goodman, director of the drugs advice agency
Release, says of the heavy rural drugs use. "We've been seeing this pattern
emerge for many years. The idea that drugs is an inner-city problem is
outdated." He believes one of the reasons for the relatively high incidence
of drug use in rural areas is class-based: the middle classes are more
likely to be taking recreational drugs, and this is reflected in the more
middle-class rural areas: "We have always received a considerable number of
calls from people in rural areas," says Goodman. Part of the reason for
this was that there was a shortage of drugs agencies in the countryside. He
believed that 'problematic' - as opposed to 'recreational' - drug use in
those areas was mainly confined to heroin, with far fewer reports of crack,
which remains a mainly inner-city drug.

Finding help and information can indeed be a problem for young people in
rural areas. Home Office research shows teenagers in rural areas are living
in ignorance about drugs because they are too embarrassed to ask for
information. In small communities - possibly of only a few hundred people -
everybody knows everybody else, from the doctor to the local police officer
and the teacher. They fear that any admission of interest in drugs will
leave them exposed and stigmatised: simply by asking for advice they will
be viewed as addicts.

The Drug Action Team in Worcestershire, under co-ordinator Allan Jones,
uses a decommissioned ambulance to take the message out into the country.
'We've split the ambulance up into a couple of rooms. People can come in to
get advice and help about drugs and alcohol,' he says.

Harry Shapiro of Druglink, the magazine of the Institute for the Study of
Drug Dependence, pointed to the rural areas of south-west England,
particularly Somerset and Devon, as having a long tradition of festivals
and travellers. Cannabis, magic mushrooms and amphetamines had long been
part of the culture for teenagers in that area, he suggests. Druglink is
also aware of the sharp increase in heroin in rural areas in Avon,
Somerset, Devon and Cornwall.

A drug worker in the region says: "Smack is just swimming around this
village, it's phenomenal. Most of the young people here use heroin on a
recreational basis."

Ruth Joyce, the head of education and prevention at the Standing Conference
on Drug Abuse (SCODA), believes there are three main reasons for young
people in the country to be more attracted to drugs than their counterparts
in the inner city.

First, as May observed, it is much more difficult for a 14-year-old to buy
alcohol or go into a pub in an area where he or she is known and the
off-licensee or publican knows the teenager's parents; second, it is much
easier to grow and harvest cannabis and magic mushrooms clandestinely in
the countryside without running any major risk of being caught; and third,
she says, there is the boredom factor: 'You can't go to the cinema or
rollerskating in the evening.' Some police forces with large rural areas
are conscious of the levels of drug-taking. Staffordshire police are
holding their largest ever drugs conference next month. 'A number of
agencies are finding that an increasing amount of their time and resources
are being devoted to the problem of drugs and young people,' says the
conference organiser, WPC Jane Jepson, the Staffordshire police schools
liaison officer.

Dr Mike Wall, the director of public health for South Staffordshire, says:
'Drug-taking is now institutionalised in schools. It is a problem even in
the rural areas.' He and other members of the local Drug Action Team were
concerned at the level of both drug and alcohol use.

Teenagers in the rural areas tend to face a more punitive law enforcement
system than those in the inner cities. It was, for instance, West Mercia
police who decided to pursue Mick Marlowe, the writer who had produced a
book on how to grow cannabis and was selling it through magazines. He was
arrested and jailed for a year; no metropolitan police forces have taken
such action in recent years, although similar books are sold over the
counter with impunity.

Equally, a teenager smoking cannabis in an isolated rural area may find
that the local police are less tolerant than those in inner cities, who are
more likely to just issue a caution or turn a blind eye to simple possession.

There is no evidence that campaigns against drugs have had a major effect
on drug-takers in rural areas. In as yet unpublished research for the Home
Office, Louise Ridley of Teesside University's criminology department, has
found that anti-drugs campaigns can have the opposite effect to that
intended. She says that the Sorted campaign, which used a picture of the
teenager Leah Betts who died after taking Ecstasy, had a double-edged
effect: 'It frightened parents about the risk to their children of using
illegal drugs but it also added a further sense of adventure for some of
those already engaged in drugs use.'

One perhaps cynical view as to why a survey might show rural teenagers to
be heavier drug users than their urban contemporaries might be that the
latter are just better liars.

But this is not a view shared by John Balding, director of the Schools
Health Education Unit. He has spent more than 20 years studying substance
abuse by young people. He thinks that one important factor in why drug
taking among young teenagers is so rife in the countryside is that some are
"super affluent. Okay, so we also know there is a lot of poverty in rural
regions, but some of the kids come from homes that have two or three cars,
with loads of dosh," he says. "They may also be more socially active,
socially confident and socially competent compared to their urban
counterparts."

According to Balding, rural areas also tend to be perceived by parents as
less threatening. The urban environment, on the other hand, is considered
dangerous and does not encourage young people, particularly in the 13-16
age group, to go out and about as much. He is confident that the figures in
the survey are accurate: "We really do get an amazing response from the
11-16 age group; the quality of data is superb. We can get kids to
genuinely believe in the importance of what we are doing, much more so than
in sixth form or university students."

Goodman, of Release, believes that what the research shows is merely that
drug use now knows no boundaries, whether of age, class or geography: "It
now cuts across all social classes," he says.

Meanwhile, the tens of thousands of countrysiders who marched so cheerily
on London 10 days ago in defence of rural rights might like to ponder just
exactly what the teenage children they left behind might have been doing
while they were enjoying the fresh air of Hyde Park.