Breakthrough Britain – Addictions

Here are a number of the key quotes from the Conservative Party’s Social Justice Policy Group’s paper on addictions.

Young people’s drugs services and drugs education programmes remain remised on a philosophy of harm reduction, though there is little evidence of his being a safe or effective approach to the prevention of substance abuse.
[page 9]

The preferred harm reduction approach to drugs education in schools, promoted by government though lacking a sound evidence base, could be doing as much harm as good.
[page 10]

The efficacy of random or other modes of drug testing in schools has never been properly trialled and researched in the UK. We believe that government should tender for well designed systematic experimental trials to be conducted in different parts of the country and across different school settings. In this context we also propose the trialling of effective addiction education in schools, again inviting well designed research applications
[page 14]

Much government generated advice has been condemned as patronising, pointless and even as encouraging drug use in attempts to be ‘non judgemental’ and to key into perceptions of youth culture and values. We have had our attention drawn to material designed for young people, put out by charities in receipt of government contracts, which seems quite irresponsible.
[page 67]

There is extremely limited evidence of long term impact on reducing drug use as a result of any type of drugs education in schools. The harm reduction drugs education that now predominates in the UK has no foundation in evidence. This form of drugs education may be as damaging as it is helpful. [page 68]

The education harm reduction message has not been one of abstention or indeed one of encouraging abstinence but of encouraging children to be safer than they might be. This is not ‘value free’. It is based on an ideology of freedom of choice applying to children which assumes that given the correct information children and adolescents are free individuals who can make further free (and sensible) behavioural choices. All the evidence suggests that many of them cannot.
[page 68]

The ethos such drugs education reflects in relation to children is worrying. It leaves those children whose parents are neither establishing boundaries, nor supervising them, particularly vulnerable and especially to peer pressure. It assumes equal resilience amongst children – but this of course is not the case. The official approach to schools drugs education seems to be particularly out of step with revised ‘non negotiable’ education approaches to the most problematic children. It appears also to be out of step with the concerns of scientific experts about cannabis.
[page 68]

One ‘meta- analysis’ of research findings concluded that there is a small but measurable effect of school prevention programmes rather than firm evidence of absence. This suggests that even if the effect of school based alcohol and drug prevention is small it might be a cost effective intervention and therefore desirable.

The lesson from this is clear – there is a need for carefully trialled and tested methodologically sound schools drug and alcohol education prevention programmes before wider implementation. In short, we need to start from square one.
[page 70]

We propose the proper trialling of drugs testing in schools. We suggest that the new National Addiction Trust should tender for a well designed research project, encompassing different types of schools and different areas.

Months or even years can pass before parents realise a child is using drugs, by which time treatment is much tougher. Drug testing in schools might close that gap. More than 1,000 high schools and middle schools in the USA now conduct random drug testing. Students who turn up positive are typically barred from after-school activities briefly and required to get counselling and another test. Only the school, a drug counsellor and parents find out; the point is to treat this as a health problem, not a police matter.

Advocates of testing say it gives students a powerful reason to say no to peer pressure — critics have argued that the tests are invasive and expensive, and that studies show testing doesn’t deter drug use. What is missing is definitive research that would allow policy makers to make confident decisions, balancing costs against benefits. This needs to be remedied.
[page 112]

The evidence that drugs and alcohol education is effective is thin, as shown in Part One. There is no evidence that the harm reduction education approach is effective in moderating children’s and adolescent’s behaviour.

However there exists a powerful role for drugs educators to equip young people with a solid foundation of information to empower them to make the right decisions, with the understanding of the real dangers of drug abuse and addiction.
[page 112]

Systematic carefully designed research to test the impact of different approaches [to what they call addictation education] – scientific, informational, experiential and personal, and peer led interactive – to be tested and compared across different school settings is required. Impact measures need to look at comprehension and retention in addition to longer term behaviour change. This requires a ‘capture and recapture’ method or other form of longitudinal, cohort study.
[page 113]

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