Drugs, kids and dangerous nonsense

Drugs and drug users were my path into social work in the early ’70s. Gradually I moved from street-based work to more formal settings and then on to local and governmental bodies. I was a member of the Advisory Council for the Misuse of Drugs until 1995, a member of the Standing Conference of Drug Abuse for twelve years, co-authored the first codification of the government response to solvent abuse — glue sniffing — in 1979 and co-wrote the Home Office information films that followed on from this. I sat in front of several prime ministers in Downing Street (dreadful tea and cheap biccies) and advised them to the best of my knowledge. No matter what other paths my career took until my retirement in 1997, drugs were a component.

Here in Pakistan a less active role but a close observer and commentator, and in these days a rising sense of alarm. A lot of people, possibly through no fault of their own and acting in what they believe is a right and proper way, are getting a lot of things very wrong when it comes to tacking the multiple and complex drugs — and we are talking all drugs here — problems that afflict Pakistan.

Alarm bells rang when I read the first reports of a proposal to test schoolchildren for drugs, and have rung ever louder since. Now two standing committee reports on the drug testing of students in Islamabad have been tabled and, although they are going to fall with the change of government, they display a dangerous and pervasive set of misconceptions.

The spur for all this activity is a welter of anecdotal reports that ‘drug use in schools was on the rise, and something must be done.’ The fact is that there are no empirically researched facts about drug use in schools because there has not been a single piece of science-based research as to incidence, drug typology or an attempt to differentiate between use, abuse and addiction. Nothing. In fact — those uncomfortable facts again — the last piece of drugs-related research in-country was in 2013 when the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) concluded that drug use was more prevalent in the 25-39 than in the 15-24 demographic which is the target of future legislation. There has been no attempt to do anything similar in any schools that I can find. Any proposed legislation is science-free.

Then consider the scale of what is being proposed and weigh that against the capacity of any future government to respond effectively — note effectively — to those students who as a result of a forced test, there will be nothing voluntary about testing and penalties for refusal and/or failure — require a formal intervention.

There are a handful of drug and alcohol treatment facilities nationally and none of them are government run. The infrastructure costs for the proposed interventions are astronomical, the human rights implications are going to keep a raft of lawyers busy for years and the implications for community medicine not even considered never mind factored in.

Mandatory drug testing implies a mandatory response, a response that no government in the foreseeable future is going to have the capacity to make. A handful of muddle-headed and poorly-informed but well-intentioned legislators have opened a Pandora’s box, because even if the proposed bills lapse the seeds are sown for a continuity of action in the next government. This needs to stop, stop now, a deep breath be taken and a line drawn and a return to basics before this nonsense gets any closer to being the rule of law.

The problem of drugs and school-age children is nothing new anywhere and most developed countries have had to face it. Drug ‘fashions’ come and go among young people, there are occasional knee-jerk moral panics — and the proposals now on the table are close to being a moral-panic response — and governments have discovered that legislation that tries to hit a moving target never hits the mark. There is the local capacity to run the necessary studies to establish baselines, no need for expensive external consultants and yes if asked I would be happy to help. (Sigh…shakes head and walks into sunset.)

Published in The Express Tribune, May 31^st, 2018.

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