Eric Carlin’s Blog

I ran what, at least for me, was a very interesting workshop on helping prevent under-age drinking at a conference at the Barbican on Tuesday. From the numbers who attended it’s clear that people are waking up to the need to encourage healthy behaviours to prevent teenagers wrecking their lives when young and as adults. We focussed very much on what young people themselves said about why they drank to excess - and supply wasn’t the only thing; there was also that attitude of “why not?”. The most interesting observations in the discussion for me were, however, when we talked about the need for adults - yes, you and me - to think about and modify our own drinking behaviour, rather than just continually going on about the need to prevent youngsters binge drinking. It’s a difficult one though; unless something really extreme happens, adults - like teenagers - don’t think their drinking is a problem.  The UK definitely has a cultural difficulty with alcohol. When young people I’ve worked with have described their families introducing them to drinking, this hasn’t been the idyll of the big Italian family sharing a social experience; rather it’s been the parents getting cut-price lager from duty frees to keep the kids off the streets or buying them drinks in the bar and then sending them off to a corner so the parents can be uninterrupted. Parents, teachers, politicians and others who want to educate young people may need to face up to some harsh realities about themselves.

The Ofsted report today that describes how many teenagers are misusing alcohol and other (for them) illegal drugs reinforces Mentor’s ongoing case for more and better prevention activities, starting as early as possible. This does not mean just drugs education but must include properly joined-up activities which improve young people’s aspirations and ability to resist pressure to use drugs.

It was also noticable that young people expressed great concern about issues such as bullying. Drug misuse prevention activities must encourage young people to thrive and have aspirations, to value themselves and to contribute to society. By combatting issues such as bullying, we can enable this to happen. We will also see reductions in other anti-social behaviours.

For Mentor, the fact that young people are often more worried about bullying is no surprise. Within our alcohol project we interviewed young people about what they thought was leading younger and younger people to misuse alcohol. They told us very clearly that they were worried about being bullied and fitting in, with the transition period from primary to secondary school being the most worrying time.

The answer therefore is holistic prevention, reinforcing and encouraging healthy and social behaviours and responsibilities, not “Just say no”.

Yesterday I spoke at the Federation of Drug and Alcohol Professionals’ annual conference about evidence based drug prevention. It was clear that people supported the idea that we need more and better prevention and this needs to be properly resourced through the new Drugs strategy.

Although we know that scare tactics are only effective with small numbers of people, politicians still focus on these rather than investing in building environments - in schools, in communities, in families - where young people can thrive and have aspirations. We also need to spend less on criminal justice and supply reduction and more on effective demand reduction.

We need more evaluation of prevention activities in the UK and Europe, diversion of funds into research on prevention and investment in holistic approaches thatw ork. We shouldn’t be having visitors going into schools to deliver 1 or 2 sessions to young people and expect that that will protect them. We also shouldn’t cite the fact that that kind of approach has little effectiveness as evidence that “prevention doesn’t work”.