Evidence based drug prevention
14 November, 2007
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”.
14 November, 2007 at 5:03 pm
[...] MembersTags: Mentor UK Eric Carlin, Chief Executive of Mentor UK, has just started a blog. In his first post he reflects on a presentation he gave to the Federation of Drug and Alcohol Professionals: Although [...]
15 November, 2007 at 9:20 am
Political spin aside, illegal drugs are not controlled drugs. Indeed nothing can be said to be controlled unless the supply side is controlled. The would seem to be the first and most obvious step to take in order to reduce harm caused by drugs and the trade in them.
If substances are dangerous, then they should be treated as being dangerous by society. This would mean selling in packaging which carries health warnings, dose information, age limits and so on. None of these are possible until we scrap prohibition.
Unless we take this important first step, demand reduction is, I’m afraid, bound to fail. Worse, it becomes the mantra of the prohibitionist determined to try anything rather than face the reality of the need for law reform.