Drug Education

IN AMERICA, LESSONS LEARNED

But Efforts to Warn People Off Drugs Are Still Too Timid

HIS memories are addled, but the young member of Cocaine Anonymous
can just about recall his formal drug education. When he was about
11, he says, a police officer made several visits to his school to
give warning of the dangers posed by illicit substances. Although he
remembers thinking the cop was "something of a Dudley-Do-Right" he
agreed with him that drugs were best avoided. He recalls no further
lessons. By his late teens he was addicted to crack cocaine and
methamphetamine.

By far the best way of reducing the harm that drugs can do is to
convince people not to take them. Spraying crops, seizing shipments
and arresting dealers can drive up prices and create temporary
shortages. But it does not stop drug use. Addicts simply pay more for
crummier product or switch to other, often more harmful, substances.
Cocaine-takers may move to powder amphetamine or crystal meth; heroin
addicts experiment with oxycodone. "It's like a water-bed. Push down
in one place and another drug pops up," says Rod Skager, who surveys
teenagers' drug-taking for the California state government.

In the late 1980s cocaine-taking fell steeply among 12th-grade
pupils--that is, 17- and 18-year-olds--according to the University of
Michigan's long-running Monitoring the Future survey. Those teenagers
reported that the drug was more available than ever. They had simply
decided not to take it on the grounds that it was harmful. The same
thing happened with ecstasy earlier in this decade. Given the strong
link between perceptions of harm and use, it is a bad sign that
attitudes to cocaine are again becoming rather relaxed.

Most attempts to reduce drug demand in America are aimed at 11- to
14-year-olds. The principle is that children should be reached while
they are still fairly pliable and before they begin to take
drugs--not just the hard stuff but alcohol, marijuana and tobacco.
The hope is that they will develop a broad aversion to harmful
substances that will stay with them through their late teens and
early 20s, when drug use peaks. Only when an immensely damaging drug
emerges suddenly, as crystal meth did in some western states a few
years ago, are concerted efforts made to communicate with older teenagers.

Until recently the dominant approach was Drug Avoidance Resistance
Education (DARE), a programme developed in Los Angeles in 1983 and
quickly exported to the rest of America. Cops would arrive in
schools, sometimes driving cars confiscated from drug-dealers, and
tell 11- and 12-year-olds about the dangers of illicit substances.
They drew little or no distinction between marijuana and
methamphetamine. Teachers liked DARE because they felt uncomfortable
tackling the topic themselves, and because they got a break. Parents
liked it because they felt their children would listen to police officers.

Unfortunately, they did not. A string of academic studies labelled
DARE pointless at best. Some academics--and former drug-takers--argue
that efforts to scare young children about drugs that they may not
have heard of are actually counter-productive. "They're a challenge,"
says Taylor, a Los Angeles native who is recovering from an addiction
to crack cocaine and heroin. The federal government opted not to pay
for the programme. It survives (DARE claims it is still used in 72%
of America's school districts), but in an altered form. It has even
been dropped by the Los Angeles school district, where it began.

The new approach to drug education, reflected in the remodelled DARE,
is more oblique. By means of role-playing, cops and teachers try to
provide children with the confidence to resist pressures of all
kinds, from drugs to internet bullying. Rather than telling children
that drugs are dangerous, teachers assure them that they are rare.
Drugs are no longer treated as a unique, self-contained threat--which
indeed they are often not. "Kids do not normally walk in with a drug
problem who do not have other problems," says Lori Vollandt, who
co-ordinates health programmes in Los Angeles' schools.

The new programmes are mostly intended to reduce alcohol, marijuana
and tobacco use, and are evaluated in those terms. There is a good
reason for that. Because they are so widespread, the total harm
caused to teenagers by alcohol and tobacco is much greater than the
total harm caused by harder drugs. There is also a less good reason.
Educators worry about the "boomerang effect", in which talk about
drugs feeds curiosity about them.

The success of the campaign against methamphetamine suggests the
boomerang effect is overdone, at least for older teenagers. Meth is
an old drug that suddenly became popular again in the late 1990s. It
is generally made by cooking ammonia, lithium and pseudoephedrine, a
decongestant. The manufacturing process is extremely dangerous and
the finished product hardly safer. Faced with an epidemic, Montana
and other western states rolled out advertising campaigns. But rather
than emphasise the drug's addictiveness and long-term effects on the
brain, as earlier anti-drug campaigns had done, these pointed out
that meth users often had rotten teeth. It worked: in the past five
years attitudes to the drug have hardened and use has dropped steeply.

Even greater success has been achieved against tobacco. Since the
mid-1990s, the proportion of 12th-grade pupils who believe smoking a
packet or two of cigarettes a day carries a great risk has risen by
about ten percentage points. Regular puffing on cigarettes is now
thought much more dangerous than occasionally smoking crack.

There are several reasons for this. Hollywood has virtually stopped
glamorising cigarettes. Executives have been shamed and smokers
ostracised. But a big reason is that the people who create
anti-tobacco ads have refined their messages. They now know, for
example, that warnings about long-term health effects do not scare
teenagers. The long-term is too far off. Pointing out that
second-hand smoke can harm babies turns out to work. So do ads
suggesting that non-smokers are more popular.

It may seem odd that the campaign against tobacco, a legal drug, has
displayed so much more elan than the war on illegal drugs. Yet this
is natural. Making a drug illegal may discourage some people from
taking it, but it also discourages frank conversation and clear
thinking. It is much easier to attack something if it is brought into
the light.