END THE REEFER MADNESS, GET REAL - US DRUG EXPERTS

Drug education programmes which urge teenagers to "just say no" to cannabis
are based on hypocrisy and simply don't work, say two American drug policy
experts.

Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy
Foundation, and Marsha Rosenbaum, director of the group's San Francisco
office, visited New Zealand this week at the invitation of the Coalition
for Cannabis Law Reform.

Dr Rosenbaum compared American drug education programmes and their
abstinence message with the SADD (Students Against Drink Driving) message
on drinking and driving.

SADD, while urging students not to use alcohol, recognised some would still
drink alcohol and outlined ways to keep them safe if they did.

"We call that harm reduction, assuming that despite our wishes that young
people are going to experiment, but wanting to be there for them if they
get in trouble and need help."

But Dr Rosenbaum said the prohibition on cannabis "closed the conversation"
and made it difficult for parents and teachers to discuss the issue with
teenagers.

She said "just saying no" didn't work because it was based on a false
premise. "In America today, and I suspect in New Zealand as well, Americans
are not saying `no to drugs'. We are not a drug-free culture.

"We imbibe with alcohol. We use pharmaceutical and over-the-counter
substances and increasingly young people themselves are being prescribed
Ritalin, which is a drug, and the kids know it. We are not drug-free."

Dr Rosenbaum said drug education faced a major credibility gap for
teenagers. "The saddest part of drug education in my country is that our
messages have been so ludicrous we really are still doing Reefer Madness
(an anti-cannabis film from the 1930s).

"We are telling kids they will get addicted to cannabis, that it is a
gateway to harder drugs and they just laugh at us."

Dr Rosenbaum said she had repeatedly heard stories of young people who
discounted messages about harder drugs like heroin, because the messages
about cannabis weren't based in reality.

Dr Nadelmann said repeated studies on drug education programmes using the
abstinence message showed they didn't work, apart from making young people
feel better about the police.

"It is very much a feel good programme. The police participate, they feel
good and like the contact with young people. Parents get to feel that
something is being done and some teachers like it because they can get an
hour off."

Dr Nadelmann said drug education programmes invariably had either police
officers or reformed drug users talking to children.

"It's like going to business school and the only people allowed to teach
business are people who have never run a business or those who have gone
bankrupt."

Dr Nadelmann said the key to understanding US drug policy was to constantly
remember it was one of the few countries to have alcohol prohibition.

"We have a temperance movement and temperance ideology that lies within our
national psyche . . . and when we repealed prohibition essentially a lot of
that temperance ideology shifted over to other drugs, especially cannabis."