PUBLIC SCHOOLS TOLD TO BEWARE DANGERS OF ILLEGAL DRUGS

The headteachers of Britain's most expensive schools have been warned
that the privileged backgrounds of their fee-paying students are not
necessarily a protection against the "evil" of illegal drugs.

A bereaved mother told them that many teachers and parents seemed to
think that prosperity shielded their children from the drugs trade,
but that dealers targeted public school pupils because they had money
to spend.

Elizabeth Burton-Phillips, head of Godstowe preparatory school in High
Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, and a campaigner against illegal drugs,
said: "Could it be that one of the significant problems that
middle-class youth face in our independent schools is denial that your
school could ever have any drug problem or the foolish belief that
cannabis is not that serious?

"As one middle-class parent remarked to me recently, 'We are lucky, we
don't have a problem with drugs in our schools in the Royal Borough of
Windsor and Eton, because the Queen lives here. This is why we pay our
fees.'"

The damage that drugs can cause even in the cloistered world of a
UKP25,000-a-year boarding school was illustrated this year by the case
of William Jaggs, who was committed to Broadmoor in July after
admitting killing Lucy Braham, a fashion designer.

The killer and his victim knew each other because their fathers were
both senior masters at Harrow, one of England's oldest and most
prestigious private schools. Jaggs, a former Harrow pupil, became a
heavy user of cocaine and LSD while he was a student at Oxford.

Mrs Burton-Phillips's twin sons, Nick and Simon, became addicted after
experimenting with cannabis when they were pupils at a fee-paying
school. Nick committed suicide in 2004, aged 28.

Teachers attending the annual meeting of the Headmasters' and
Headmistresses' Conference in Bouremouth watched in silence as she
showed disturbing pictures of what drugs had done to her sons.

"There is this feeling that within the public school system children
are safe from the dangers of the outside world. Actually, you are just
as vulnerable as anybody - and more vulnerable because of your money,"
she added.

"Since speaking at many independent schools, it is shocking to have
discovered that the pupils are not informed about the sophisticated
grooming techniques used by drug dealers, to help unsuspecting, naive,
wealthy pupils to progress from the 'fun' of recreational drugs to a
place of despair, decay and death."

She added: "We do not need more liberal strategies - drastic action is
required by all of us - government, schools and parents. Drugs are the
absolute evil of our society, and addiction is a silent epidemic.

"All parents are rightly terrified that their children may be targeted
and abused by a paedophile. Why then, is very little said about the
grooming which is done by drug dealers?"

Anthony Seldon, master of Wellington College and author of a biography
of Tony Blair, warned the meeting that pupils might be driven to
become "high on drugs" by excessive pressure to pass exams. He said:
"The greatest problem is this obsession - the way that we have allowed
our schools to be taken over by the ideology of testing and
examinations as the sole criterion of what makes a good school. It is
leading to distress that leads to drug-taking."

But he added that his policy was one of "zero tolerance". Any pupil
caught with illegal drugs should be expelled, as a warning to others
that even cannabis can ruin lives.

"I heard the other day about an adult who smoked a joint - his first
joint - and he lost his mind for six months. You can just be unlucky.
You can have this predisposition which can tip you into psychotic
disorder and malfunction which can be cataclysmic and from which some
people can never recover their baseline sanity."