C.E.P.T.A.
The CAMPAIGN for EFFECTIVE PREVENTION and TREATMENT of ADDICTION.
5h. Which is the Best Lesson for Your Child?
by Kenneth Eckersley
Prevention is without doubt the best Cure, especially in the drugs field. But stopping the creation of new drug users requires a variety of truly effective forms of prevention delivered to all age groups in a variety of environments which must include parents and the home, as well as teachers, employers, police, doctors and the courts, etc.
Dictionaries tell us that “Prevention" is fundamentally, "the act of anticipating or preparing for some possible future event or condition with the intention of stopping it from occurring, i.e. keeping it from happening ".
Everyday examples of this are ‘fire-prevention’, ‘accident prevention’, ‘prevention of cruelty to animals’, ‘prevention of cruelty to children’ and ‘crime prevention’, etc. In all these cases the message is clear - we want to stop fires from starting, accidents from happening, cruelty and crime from taking place. AND we want to act now to make sure these unwanted life and health threatening events do not ever occur.
What a shame that the same clarity of message is being deliberately obscured, diverted and even reversed when it comes to "drug prevention" and government drugs policies!
Legalisation, for example, is historically proven as being anti-prevention. It increases drug usage, not only because existing users use more, but mainly because former non-users feel it is now officially ‘OK’ to use drugs and because government must make supplies more plentiful and less expensive so as to keep out the illegal supplies.
Like every other business in the world, the pharmaceutical drug companies are in business to make money. Their advertising says they exist to ‘help’ us. But the obvious major reason for their steady development of legally prescribed drug use is that we are talking about a legal drugs market worth many billions of pounds just in this country alone (and, contrary to the popularly promoted misconception, drugs don't have to be illicit to prompt a user into crime! )
Legally prescribed methadone caused 19 deaths in one small Northumbrian town in one year. Legal alcohol is the main factor in marriage break-ups, football hooliganism, violence, mad driving, attacks on property and a host of other crimes.
Legally prescribed anti-depressive drugs have been cited as the root cause of numerous suicides and rampage killings, and legally prescribed tranquillisers are now known as the cause of increasingly numerous family problems and as the source of horrendous side effects, shop-lifting tendencies and other crimes by housewives of all ages – including pensioners!
For the same reasons that you wouldn't expect drug smugglers (i.e. the illegal market) to produce a cure for addiction, don't expect the pharmaceutical industry to seriously try and kill that golden egg-laying goose called "addiction", when it is much more profitable to take over the street drug-pusher's customers rather than to cure them – which is what methadone substitution ‘therapy’ is all about!
Neither of these parties is one jot interested in curing drug usage. Quite the reverse. After all their job is to create increasing drug usage – which is why the pharmaceutical companies quietly back legalisation. Dependent users are the "guaranteed market" for their products. (Obscuring the basic intention of their work is the deliberate introduction of words like 'misuse' and 'abuse' - which are intended to explain away the addiction as the user's fault - not the supplier's!)
Obviously illicit drug-smugglers, basement 'drug factory'
pill producers and
For example, amongst others, even the All Party Parliamentary Drugs Misuse Group, which meets regularly in the Houses of Parliament, is not without its drugs legalisation, decriminalisation or liberalisation members, a majority of whom even serve as Officers and Chairpersons.
And their presence is too often reflected in the Group’s choice of psycho-pharmacological subjects and pro-liberalisation and legalisation speakers who are invited to address the Group on a variety of drug-related subjects.
Not surprising that, based on a
presentation made by speakers from Radio 1 and a Channel 4 production company,
the circulated "Notes" on the All Party Parliamentary Drugs Misuse
Group meeting of
If only in order to balance the nature of these presentations, it would have been appropriate also to hear from say the Director of the "National Drug Prevention Alliance" or from the "Positive Prevention Plus" charity? But this has yet to occur.
Whilst the so-called "Colombian Drug Barons" do not advertise; our huge alcohol and pharmaceutical industries do. And like their illegal competitors, they also lobby our MPs, senior Civil Service staff and MEPs in order to protect and expand their ever more profitable marketplaces. To do this, they employ experts. Front organisations and some of the top paid advertising and PR agencies in the world. And their job, of course, is to get results. But what sort of results??
Clearly more sales and obviously more profit. Greater profits can only come from increased prices or from lower costs. More sales can only come 1) from selling more to existing users, OR, 2) from persuading new customers to join the party!
But most of the existing users are already getting as much as they can afford. So unavoidably and inevitably, the only way to expand the drugs market is by finding or creating new 'user-customers'.
But where are these new user-customers going to come from?
From amongst 30, 40, 50 and 60 year old parents and grand-parents? Of course not! These are the generations which were captured by the drug known as the 'demon-drink' in their youth. Today 95% of us take a drink on a fairly regular basis and so think we don't need drugs to have a good time . . . ! (But we do of course use them in stomach and headache tablets for our hangovers, daily tranquillisers, nightly sleeping pills, anti-depression capsules and our cold cures, etc., etc.)
So where are the new user-customers coming from for nicotine, alcohol, cannabis, heroin, amphetamines, crack, cocaine and ecstasy, plus methadone, Ritalin, Prozac and other psychiatric prescription drugs?
The answer we all know is - from the 6 to 26 year olds - with the accent on the younger ones, because children are easier to get started and they are the user-customers who will ‘use’ twice as long as a 35 or 40 year old. So all that highly skilled professional promotional and marketing attention is, in the final analysis, focussed on finding, creating or enticing new user-customers from amongst OUR children.
An often quoted Jesuit priest once said: "Give me a child until he is seven, and I will make him a Christian for life". Now we have the drug producers and distributors saying: "Give me a child before or during his teens and I will make him (or her) a drug-user for life"!
But it's our children they are talking about. Yours and mine. And they just do not care what the drugs do to them, especially because dependency and addiction make them more controllable. Why give workers a big disposable income when you have already brought them to a point where all they need and want is their daily fix?
Why even worry about workers when we have automation, computerisation and so-called intelligent robots to do the main production work? Robots can't even think of going on strike or about better wages or working conditions, because its not in their programming! The problem with human beings is that they cannot be successfully programmed (that is, controlled) except with drugs – which make robotic humans!
This may be a first glimpse of what many informed and concerned authorities consider is some grand plan for planetary domination. Like me, you probably think it’s just a science - fiction story. I don't know.
But look it full in the face and remember that we've had the agricultural society, we've had the industrial revolution and we are now well into the electronics revolution, and consider that the next step could well be the 'bio-chemical society', a society controlled by drugs!
Where would they start with this? That’s right, with our children. So this - far-fetched as it may seem to us - could conceivably be what we would also be preventing, when we engage in truly effective primary drug prevention.
And we call it PRIMARY DRUG PREVENTION to distinguish it from all the "psycho-babble" which many types of 'recognised drug workers', educational psychologists, drug suppliers, prescribers and distributors are right now trying to pass-off as "drugs education". Because make no mistake, one of the jobs of that vast army of marketing and PR men, is to get rid of barriers to drug consumption, and a major barrier for years has been realistic and effective prevention.
But they can't openly try to get prevention banned or propose it be abandoned. They have to be far more subtle than that.
So their game plan (usually recognised only by those who know and value effective prevention) is "to be seen to promote drugs education", so as to take control of the whole field of youth drug prevention, and thus be able to exclusively provide it - but not on the basis of the earlier definition we studied above.
Their concepts of prevention are totally different, and those differences are portrayed by the words they use, and the new meanings they have for some time been assigning to them.
In her excellent review of what is actually happening right now in the field of Drug Prevention Education, Ann Stoker, Principal Consultant to Positive Prevention Plus, exposes the development of "weasel words".
Words which are being re-defined or misused to give them a different, sometimes more sinister meaning, or sometimes even a less sinister or less precise meaning, than normal, just in order to distract one's attention away from what is really going on. Hitler's Propaganda Minister, Goebbels, was a past master at this, so that under the cover of "weasel words" some of the greatest atrocities of recent times were committed by a German population being led by their noses down paths which the majority of them would never have contemplated - had the truth not been so skilfully hidden from them.
So weasel words are not just a playful way of putting a point of view, nor are they merely current 'professional' jargon. They are part of a deliberate plot to mislead the mass of our population along paths they would never normally contemplate, and weasel words are daily in use here!
‘Harm reduction’ , ‘informed choice’ (of drugs) & ‘responsible use’ (of drugs) are all drugs education aims based on use - rather than on prevention.
To be effective, preventative drugs education must recognise the intelligence of our youth and their level of "street wisdom" and therefore be based on the truth about drugs rather than on some of the psycho-babble which has been passing for drugs education.
Research shows that knowledgeable
parents have always been the most effective prevention force. Yet in the
Therefore, to be totally effective, drugs education must take account of the degree of influence which parents can normally be expected to have on their children's development. Up to when they leave home, most youngsters tend to regard their parents as authorities to whom they can come with a vast variety of problems for answers and guidance.
Unfortunately this does not usually hold good when it comes to drugs. Mum and Dad are out of communication to the degree that they are unwilling to discuss this subject with their children. But why should they be unwilling?
Because, in addition to having been dismissed or marginalised by professional psycho-babble - as well as by some media - the truth is that: most parents have been told nearly nothing of the important facts about drugs. As a result, anything they have to say on the subject comes straight out of their fear, out of the sensationalism of media reports and out of their lack of any real knowledge. It therefore most often emerges as awkward unsupported condemnation of their offsprings.
Yet the problem is so easily handled. To make drugs education work - our parents must also have full access to truly effective drugs prevention education for themselves.
Parents need these facts because drugs are one of our children's peer group subjects about which they hear something new every day at school, on a basis which includes all sorts of misunderstandings, false ideas, mystery, speculation, excitement and even some apparent adventure - especially in the way drugs are glowingly presented by user ‘friends’ and pushers.
The end of discussion on drugs between children and their parents is when Mum and Dad get upset and it becomes clear that neither of them "knows". The children then mistrust their guidance on that subject.
However, by fully and truthfully informing themselves about drugs at an early stage, parents can preserve their original powerful educational link with their children, and so make valuable and effective drugs education a low cost reality.
To obtain 'Drugs Fact Sheets' and confidential guidance on effective drugs prevention education, you may wish to phone or fax (01342) 811099 for details.
Kenneth Eckersley, HSDC, FInstD, FCMI, MCIM, HonMPHMA(Int), is a former Magistrate and Justice of the Peace, a qualified drugs policy consultant to both employers and employees, Chief Executive Officer of Addiction Recovery Training Services (ARTS), speaker, author and broadcaster, and founder of the Campaign for the Effective Treatment of Addiction (CETA).
N.B. In the field of PREVENTION of drug-use, CEPTA supports and recommends the definitions and activities of the U.K. NATIONAL DRUG PREVENTION ALLIANCE, which history shows is amongst the world’s most successful drug-use prevention operations
when availability of funding permits them to get their messages out.
© Copyright C.E..P.T.A. and E. Kenneth Eckersley, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 & 2005. All World Rights Reserved