ELITE SCHOOLS GREET BACKSTREET DRUGS CRUSADER

Top independent schools are calling on a drugs counsellor with a past to
give pupils the hard facts, says Susan Elkin

CLAD in Victorian wing collars and pinstriped skirts and trousers, 250
1315yearold pupils of King's school, Canterbury, sit in serried ranks in
their dignified school hall.

In front of them stands a balding, 46yearold man with a thin grey
ponytail. He is casually dressed and heavily tattooed. He is speaking at
top speed in a broad Liverpudlian accent. It is the shock of that very
social distance, Phil Cooper, selfemployed drugs educator, believes, which
makes him powerful.

"I've worked at Gordonstoun, Eton, Benenden and other top schools," he
says, "and none of the schools I've been to has had to expel anyone for
drugs, or at least not from the years that I've spoken to."

Cooper has a past. He knows about drugs from bitter experience. "I spent
over 20 years rebelling against everyone and everything," he says. That
rebellion involved putting "all kind of things into my body", including
heroin and LSD. "I am uneducated. I've spent time in police cells, remand
centres, prisons, hospital wards and mental homes." He walks with a limp,
having injured himself jumping from a firstfloor window under the
influence of LSD. He still has LSDrelated nightmares.

For 14 years, however, he has devoted all his energies to educating the
young. His style is informal and jokey. His message is deadly serious.

He covers the entire front of the large stage of King's school hall with
dozens of newspaper cuttings in plastic pockets, having bought every
national newspaper daily since 1984 to ensure that his "library" is
comprehensive. His collection tells a sorry tale of escalating teenage
drugs usage and its frequently fatal consequences.

The crux of his lecture is that drugtaking is madness. Drugs are bought
blind. Many are now mixed with substances even more harmful than the
narcotics their pushers claim they are, and that is especially true of
ecstasy. "To swallow ecstasy is like playing Russian roulette," he says.

Cooper mixes mysterious white powders and then invites tasters. "There," he
says triumphantly. "You didn't know what that was but you put it in your
mouth quite willingly." The substances turn out to be ­ revolting but
harmless ­ flea powder and athlete's foot powder.

"I don't tell them not to do drugs," Cooper says after his lecture. "I deal
in facts and consequences." And he focuses on consequences likely to be of
immediate interest to youngsters. Most would like to travel. Cooper tells
them how he once went to the United States by invitation but was hauled out
of the line on arrival and sent back to Britain because a computer check
had revealed an old conviction for possession of an illegal substance. "I'm
a prisoner of my past," he tells his audience, ruefully explaining he now
cannot enter more than 20 visarequiring countries.

Young people may be less immediately concerned about future employment
prospects but Cooper points out that a drugs conviction, however old,
stymies almost any job application. There is infertility, too. "I've never
been able to father children," he says. "And I blame drugs."

The pupils sit rapt and fascinated. "We do need this," one boy says
afterwards. "In a school like this you're quite protected and you need
knowledge to keep yourself safe outside."

Janet Pickering, deputy head of King's and mother of two boys there, says:
"Drugs are a major worry for parents now. So they're very supportive of any
prevention we do."

So why is Boltonbased Cooper widely used in independent schools but less
in maintainedsector schools? "Partly because this is my living, so I have
to charge for what I do. State schools often don't have the money," Cooper
says. He charges about £400 a day.

The other reason is that government guidelines advise chariness about use
of former offenders in drugs education. Some local authorities ­ Liverpool,
for example ­ have a blanket policy of not using people like Cooper in any
of the schools they control.

Naturally, Cooper would like to do more work in the maintained sector.
"People think that independent school pupils come from such welloff
families that they've got plenty of money for drugs so they're more at
risk," he says. "That's wrong. Some of the state school kids have got
plenty of spending money, too. You see them with their designer clothes and
mobile phones just the same. Some work for it. And if they get into drugs,
some of them steal for it."

He would also dearly like to carry his mission into universities. That
would be difficult because the students are adults and there is no
centralised pastoral care system to fund drugs education. But the risks are
high, as a King's sixthformer makes abundantly clear in a chance remark to
Cooper. In his speech, Cooper mentions "Spice Girls" ­ a frightening
cocktail of Temazepam, ephedrine and a veterinary drug, ketamine. "My
sister's in her first term at university," the boy tells Cooper. "When some
friends said they were going out to 'do Spice Girls', she hadn't a clue
what they meant." In a case like that ignorance certainly is not bliss and
knowledge is definitely power.

There may be reservations about the mixed messages that Cooper, a heavy
smoker, may be transmitting. He was quite visible lighting a cigarette
behind the school hall after the session. He chats a lot about what he does
in pubs; he is evidently a regular customer. Mainstream drugs educators
insist that tobacco and alcohol are actually the most dangerous drugs at
large in society. Cooper evidently ­ and rightly, in a way ­ makes a firm
distinction between legal and illegal drugs, but are the dangers of legal
substances quite so clear in the impressionable young minds he seeks to
influence?

Cooper's great strength as an effective educator is probably his unusual
ability to bridge a potentially huge social divide. "I can go into any
backstreet pub and be instantly accepted because of all this," he says,
indicating his tattoos. "On the other hand, I can sit chatting in a
headmaster's study and really feel that I've achieved something and that
I've earned the right to be taken seriously. Please don't dwell on my past.
It's the future of these young people which matters."