Drug Education News

Children and Young People Now has the details of the Lib Dem team:
David Laws keeps his role as shadow secretary for children, schools and families, but also gets an additional role overseeing public services generally.
Susan Kramer, the MP for Richmond and a former candidate for London Mayor, has been appointed as spokesperson for families.
And Lynne [...]

NHS Choices has a new section called Behind the Headlines
which they say is committed to providing:
an unbiased and evidence-based analysis of health stories that make the news. It aims to respond to news stories the day they appear in the media.
Sir Muir Gray, the chief knowledge officer in the NHS, says this about the concept:
“Scientists [...]

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation have a new paper on cannabis supply and young people.  They say this is a snapshot of “how young people in a large city and rural villages obtain cannabis”.  It is based on interviews with 182 cannabis users aged 11 to 19.
Given they were talking to young people who had used [...]

There’s a new report from Scottish Health Action on Alcohol Problems. I’m only going to look at one paragraph from the report which looks at the alcohol strategy - although I have to wonder if they’ve been reading the same document as me.
SHAAP say:
A strategy which just targets young people’s drinking as a problem [...]

The Daily Mail:
Teenagers and twenty-somethings are being unfairly blamed for the crisis in binge drinking.
Research today reveals that “grown-ups” are no better at knowing when to stop boozing.
Almost 44 per cent of people aged 30 to 50 said they still had not learned to stick to a safe alcohol limit, compared with 40 per cent [...]

The BBC:
A Department for Children, Schools and Families’ report shows 23 out of 53 targets were missed, with “slippage” recorded in a further seven.The goals range from teenage pregnancy, children’s drug abuse rates and obesity to literacy and numeracy standards.
Children’s Secretary Ed Balls said significant challenges remained.
These would require the government to “change and [...]

The always useful TheyWorkForYou lets me know that Nigel Evans asked the following question to Ed Balls:
Healthy youngsters have a better chance of getting a good education, and school nurses play a vital role in that. As the Royal College of Nursing has pointed out, school nurses are not just about sick bays and nits; [...]

The Telegraph:
Linda Tucker, one of the main authors of the study and a consultant nurse in sexual health and HIV, said: “The link between sexual risk and drinking too much is not the most original idea in he world but we now have clear scientific evidence of the relation ship. The Government needs to reflect [...]

Every so often you hear someone speak with apparent authority about how drug education doesn’t “work”.
It’s usually done in a “more in sorrow than in anger” tone and often there’s a vague reference or two to the evidence base - although I’ve found that it’s almost always difficult to be clear whether the speaker is [...]

I’ve been asked to bring the following course to your attention:
Working together to meet the needs of children of drug-misusing parents: train the trainers
Tuesday 29 January 2008
9.30am - 4.00pm
London
The National Children’s Bureau’s project on the children of drug misusing parents identified a range of practice and organisational issues key to addressing the needs of these [...]