Drug Education News

The New Scientist reports on developments in school drug testing in the USA:
Big Brother has arrived at a high school in New Jersey. Determined to stop their students consuming alcohol at weekends, staff at Pequannock Township High School in Morris county are to start using a controversial test that can detect if students have been [...]

One of the criticisms that the Drug Education Forum recently made of the Pathways to Problems report was that it didn’t give enough emphasis to the prevention work that schools do on a daily basis outside drug education.
I had the opportunity to see a school undertake some of this work the other day and thought [...]

The Metro have picked up on calls for the legal age for buying alcohol to be increased:
Under-21s should be banned from buying alcohol to curb Britain’s binge-drinking crisis, doctors are demanding.
Alcohol causes one in four deaths among 15 to 29-year-olds but the country is only just waking up to the dangers of drinking, they claim.
Britain’s [...]

Public Policy Research has a paper about the legal age to buy alcohol. Unfortunately all I get to see is this abstract:
In the wake of another glut of reports of binge-drinking teens, antisocial behaviour and street crime, Jasper Gerard argues that Britain has lost the plot when it comes to regulating alcohol and asks [...]

My correspondent from the last post also told me about another snippet from the TES (but didn’t send me the scan).
This time it was about a drug test from an Essex school which turned out to be a false positive test (ie they thought they had tested someone positively for taking drugs, but when they [...]

I’m grateful to the Forum member who scanned and sent me the story from the TES above (you should be able to get a bigger version if you click on it). The TES doesn’t do very much online which is why I missed this.
The piece comes from Susan Greenfield who argues that there is [...]

This is a presentation I gave to the Drug Education Forum last week. Most of the focus is on the content of the RSA report Drugs - facing facts but it also touches on the ACMD’s Pathways to Problems.

If you are unable to see it in the blog you should be able to [...]

The Sunday Herald report on research about factors that may influence young people to take up smoking:

HAVING CERTAIN personality traits could influence the chances of becoming a smoker, with outgoing people who are worriers more likely to light up.
A new study has revealed teenagers who have characteristics associated with extroversion and anxiety have a greater [...]

The Guardian:
Heavy drinking and smoking as teenagers may damage the ability to remember future tasks, according to new research.
The findings are drawn from two studies exploring teenagers’ capacity for prospective memory - the ability to remember something you had intended to do in the future, such as returning a phone call or paying a bill [...]

My thanks to Jenny for sending the links to these abstracts.
Testing a conceptual model related to weight perceptions, physical activity and smoking in adolescents:
The purpose of this study was to test a conceptual model based on theoretical and empirically supported relationships related to the influences of weight perceptions, weight concerns, desires to change weight, friends, [...]