Drug Education News

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 saying there is evidence that proves drug education doesn’t “work” or they are pointing to the lack of a proper evidence base to work from.

The implication I’ve always drawn from anyone I’ve heard talking this way is that they believe that we ought to forget drug education as a way of preventing young people developing problems with drugs.

Our stance in the Drug Education Forum is - surprise, surprise - slightly different; we start from the position that drug education should be an entitlement for young people.

We believe that first and foremost that drug education should be evaluated against its impact on young people’s knowledge, skills and their attitudes towards their own health, and that while important it is only part of the strategy that needs to be in place to reduce the numbers of young people using and developing problems with drugs.

We understand the limits of what the current evidence base tells us and want to see a bigger emphasis on improving it.

So, having got that off my chest, it’s always nice to see more of that evidence. In this case from the European Drug Addiction Prevention trial (EUDAP) which has been working in schools across seven different EU countries (though not the UK).

They have an evaluation of the programme which they say “demonstrated that the EU-Dap program was effective in reducing the onset of smoking, drunkeness and use of other drugs.”

The evaluation starts by setting out what the project was looking to measure:

The aim of the project was to plan a school-based drug prevention program and to assess its the effectiveness, through a multicentre European randomised trial. Drug prevention has been defined in the project as a complex intervention aimed either at curbing initiation with drugs or at delaying the transition from experimental to addicted behaviour of the following drugs: alcohol, tobacco, cannabis and other drugs. So, effectiveness has been measured as the ability of the program to reduce the prevalence of drug use.

They say the programme they implemented (called Unplugged) started from the following principles of what effective drug education should look like:

1. interactive curriculum;
2. information about drugs, including their effects;
3. focus on personal, social and resistance skills;
4. emphasis on normative education and reinforcement of awareness that most adolescents do not use substances;
5. structured broad-based skills training such as goal setting, communication skills, and general social skills;
6. teacher training and support from program developers or prevention experts;
7. active family and community involvement;
8. cultural sensitivity - for example by including activities tailored to the cultural experience of the classroom

If most of these seem familiar it’s probably because similar thoughts seem to have been in the heads of the people who developed Blueprint. Also familiar is some of the design of the programme:

The Unplugged core programme consists of 12 one-hour units delivered weekly by teachers at the participating schools, who attended a 3-day training course. It targets both experimental and regular use of alcohol, tobacco and illicit drugs.

The study - a randomised controlled trial - worked with over 7,000 pupils across 143 schools. This is what they say they found:

Interventions groups smoked 12% less during past 30 days, 14% less in a regular way and 30% less daily, when compared with controls. The frequency of drunkenness in past 30 days was also reduced by 28% and 31% for at least once and regularly respectively, and the consumption of cannabis was reduced by 23 and 24%, ALO and regularly respectively, The use of other drugs, although rare, was reduced by 11%.

But, as I hope you’d expect, it isn’t all plain sailing.

They are clear that the impact on behaviour they measured was over the short term; they say the follow up survey with pupils was “at least” three months after the end of the programme. And they say there was a significant difference between the programmes’ effectiveness between centres (which I think means there was a North / South divide), which needs to be explained.

That said I’d say that we can once again assert that there is evidence that drug education works, even if there’s further work to be done to improve our understanding of how to iron out the wrinkles.

I’m trying to get hold of a copy of the teaching manual - which you should be able to download from their site, but which I’ve had difficulty doing today.