START EARLY TO PREVENT ABUSE

Educate On Substance Misuse, Keep Drug Prices High

Taxes, nagging and creative thinking offer the best defence against
teen substance abuse, says a new study published yesterday.

More than 300,000 people worldwide between the ages of 15 and 29 died
from the use of alcohol or illicit drugs in 2000, numbers that
University of Victoria psychology professor Dr. Tim Stockwell called
"substantial."

Stockwell and his colleague in addictions research, Dr. John
Toumbourou of Deakin University in Australia, suggest in a study
published in the medical journal Lancet yesterday that an ounce of
prevention is well worth a pound of cure.

The team surveyed the leading methods of prevention and intervention
for adolescent substance abuse to determine what actually works when
trying to keep teens away from drugs and alcohol.

Their quest is motivated by grim statistics published for the first
time showing the alarming toll alcohol and drugs are taking on teen health.

In the developed world, the deaths of 31 per cent of people between
the ages of 15 and 29 could be linked to drugs and alcohol in 2000.

"It's by any account a large number of people dying prematurely from
totally preventable causes," said Stockwell, noting that
tobacco-related deaths couldn't be included in the tally because the
group is too young to see the health-related effects of smoking.

"There is evidence there are strategies that will be successful and,
if implemented, we could make a real dent, a real reduction in these
unnecessary deaths," said Stockwell.

A review of previous research showed teens are drinking and smoking
to conform to peer pressures but also to individualize their
identity, escape or self-manage a perceived problem.

But the Lancet study found that regulating the use and sale of drugs
works the best in preventing further abuse -- if it's expensive and
harder to get, teens won't use it.

"Controls on price, usually through taxation, are among the
interventions with the highest evidence for effectiveness in reducing
levels of harm in the population, especially for young people," the study said.

That conclusion leads Stockwell to wonder if a similar model is
necessary for the sale of cannabis in Canada.

"The prohibition model doesn't restrict its availability to young
people -- it appears to encourage it." he said.

"We'd probably have a better handle on the problem if it was taxed
and sold under very restrictive circumstances and if there were
public campaigns to reduce its attractiveness, particularly to young people."

Education campaigns, according to the study, have proven remarkably
effective in keeping teens away from drugs and alcohol, but only if
they're reinforced over time.

In the United States, the study found that for every dollar spent on
a drug education program for the first 15 years of a child's life,
the government saves $5.

Prevention, Stockwell cautioned, isn't the only route society must follow.

"Prevention around substance-use problems is to stop kids from using
drugs, end of story," he said. "We're saying it's the harm in the
whole population, it's all these deaths, all this disability and
illness that we are trying to reduce. We need a comprehensive range
of strategies."

Stockwell said that not all types of intervention work for all
communities, citing harm reduction methods as an example.

Though they've been proven to cut back on disease transmission,
needle exchanges aren't necessary in schools, Stockwell said, nor are
methadone clinics for heroin addicts suited for a workplace.

"You do have to tailor interventions to particular groups," he said.
"There's a distinction between what you might call universal or
population-wide strategies, and then there's more targeted strategies
for more high-risk or vulnerable populations."