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FREE TO CHOOSE–
HANDLING
DRUG-ORIENTED
PEER 'PRESSURE
Martín Evans, B.Sc., M. Ed., Director of TACADE
- The Teachers' Advisory Council on Alcohol and Drug
Education, centered in Manchester, England- was
interviewed by
Plain Truth
writer John Ross Schroeder.
M .
Evans, is drug de–
pendency on the in–
crease in Britain?
Orug dependcncy is on the
increase in this country. But one
wou ld have to qualify that state–
ment by going back a step and
asking what we mean by drug
dependence.
One of the real problems with that
very terminology is that people have
tended to think of hard drugs as
being the only drugs capable of caus–
ing dependency. There has been an
enormous increase in prescriptions
and the use of drugs like minor tran–
quilizers such as Mogadon, Valium
and Librium. We have now in the
region of 28 million minor tranquil–
izer prescriptions a year.
There is sorne really worrying
research coming through in rela–
tion to minor tranquilizers. They
do appear to create dependency in
very many people who use them. So
the point there is that you have got
a form of drug dependency which
is, as it were, medically legitimized,
which affects not just a few thou–
sand people in the country, but pos–
sibly millions of people.
1 would want to appl y drug
dependency in a broad sense to
include light tranquilizers and sub–
stances like alcohol- as well as the
so-called hard or illegal d rugs.
Then the answer is very definitely
28
yes--drug dependency is on the
increase.
How is drug dependency becomlng
a major social problem in the
United Kingdom?
Every single d rug creates its own
problems. Obviously illegal drugs
create certain types of social prob–
lems such as black markets, and the
whole crime network that goes with
it. Alcohol creates its own social
problems in relation to the kind of
behavior that results when people
get drunk.
Minor t ranquilizers also create
their own social problems in the way
that, say, a housewife gets along
with her children. What tranquiliz–
ers do is to keep people off their own
particular a nxiety or what you
might call thei r own t rue emotional
s tate. People in that kind of emo–
t ional vacuum are capable of doing
all sorts of things. Different drugs
create different social problems.
They are all serious in different
ways.
The attitude to addlctive drugs in
Britain has tended toward compla–
cency, has it not?
There certainly has been compla–
cency in this count ry. When the
problem extends to about 28 mil–
lion tranquil izer prescriptions a
year for something which many
people either don't need or don't
get the chance to seek alternative
solutions for- like simple anxi–
ety-1 would definitely say we are
in a state of complacency. And it's
a situation that very defini tely
needs something done about it.
What is being done by government
and private institutions to combat
the problem? In fact what is your
organization, TACADE , doing to
stem the problem in this country?
It
is probably appropriate to talk
about TACADE fi rst. We are quite
a small voluntary organization. We
only have seven or eight on our
staff. We have been working in this
field since 1969 as a fundamentally
educat ional organization. We get
ver y little space in the press
because we are working behind the
scenes with teachers and other
kinds of professional people. We
say that the problem has to do with
the whole range of legal and illegal
substances which people use to a
greater or lesser extent.
The main thing that we have just
done is to publish a program of
drug education material called
Free
to Choose.
It
contains 40 hours of
drug education material for use in
secondary schools. It has 1
O
units
of material. T hree of those units
relate to alcohol; one is on smoking;
two or three are on prescribed
drugs and the whole issue of rela–
tionships with doctors; one is on
[indust rial/household] solvent is–
sues (actually it is the first of its
kind in this country); two or three
are on illegal drugs. This program
t ries to take the broad perspective.
The kinds of methods we use in
the classroom are not formal meth–
ods. Tbey create a context whereby
young people can explore their own
The PLAIN TRUTH