Drug Education News

The Telegraph has a piece in which Caroline Flint rejects the idea of raising the age at which children and young people should be able to try alcohol at home. Of more interest to us though is the bit at the end of the article:
Prof Martin Plant, director of the Alcohol & Health Research [...]

Simon Heffer writing in The Telegraph:
I simply refuse to believe that there is any link between educating children to drink and their binge drinking in later life. Many of us started to drink long before the age of 15 and haven’t been to rehab yet, or needed a liver transplant.
Equally, I have known alcoholics who [...]

The BBC have been taking a look at how schools can engage with the most disaffected pupils:

In the past the answer was to mould the pupil to the school - and if they wouldn’t bend, throw them out.
But as more and more teachers commit to personalised learning, increasingly it is the school [...]

The BBC carries calls by Alcohol Concern about increasing the legal age at which young people should be able to be given alcohol by parents:
Parents who give alcohol to children aged under 15 should be prosecuted, a charity has said.
The call comes in an Alcohol Concern report on the government’s Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy.
The study [...]

The Conservative Party’s Addictions blog has a report from the Wellington College conference on cannabis and drug abuse. They say:
The event appeared to be a success, with many commenting that they had indeed leant a lot. However, Elizabeth Burton-Phillips voiced her disappointment at the small turn-out for a conference that was open [...]

Christopher Chope, the Conservative MP for Christchurch, has used the 10 Minute Rule proceedures of the House of Commons to introduce a Bill which if passed would reclassify cannabis as a Class B drug. In making his argument Mr Chope says:
The reason why reclassification has been such a disastrous policy is that it has [...]

The South West Public Health Observatory have a report out about young people’s smoking habits in that region. The accompanying press release says:

Health Leaders at NHS South West are warning young adults of the harmful effects of smoking following a report out today which reveals that there are up to 30,000 teenage smokers across [...]

Young People Now have a piece about Adfam’s Bouncing Back! project:
A Government-funded pilot by family support charity Adfam has found that working with families helps prevent drug and alcohol misuse by young people.
Its findings come after research from the UK Drug Policy Commission cast doubt on the effectiveness of preventive techniques in tackling drug use [...]

I’ve had a letter published in the Society Guardian:
Howard Parker (Second thoughts) says that “drugs prevention does not work”, but then goes on to describe the failures of treatment and enforcement. In fact, there is plenty of evidence for the effectiveness of drug prevention as delivered by schools and in communities. What there is less [...]

Children Now:
Fewer secondary school children took illegal drugs in 2006 than in 2001 according to figures from health research agency The Information Centre. www.ic.nhs.uk.
The Transform blog is a little more wary of the figures:
If you run from 1998, like they did with all those other stats, the proportion of pupils who have used drugs in [...]