Posted by: zanshin, 2009-03-17 03:37

Story

Drug education -- In America, lessons learned
2009-03-05 (Thursday), Economist
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 (see chart).

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 élan 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.

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