There was a sign on the wall of my 13-year-old daughter’s bedroom. It a postcard by the drugs education programme FRANK that say: “Busted for blow. Cannabis is still illegal.” Kitty has always been vehemently antitobacco, so I figured, in a prematurely smug kind of way, that this was her way of telling her mates – some of whom have tried cannabis – that she thought it was wrong. But when I read the postcard with my spectacles on I saw that she had doctored the message to read: “Busted for blow. Cannabis should not be illegal.”

Was she trying to be cool, or was this something she felt strongly about? I honestly didn’t know. We had never had a proper chat about drugs. I knew that she had received drugs education, as part of the personal health and development curriculum, since primary school, and that she knew all the slang names for drugs and had formed a vague idea that so-called soft drugs, such as cannabis, are not as bad as crack or hero-in. But she did not get this from me or her father.

I asked her about the postcard. “Why should it be legal?” She gave me a “Duh” look and said: “We live in Crackney [Hackney]. Everybody tries it; it’s not dangerous. My friend’s sister smokes it all the time and she’s fine.” “What’s fine?” I spluttered. “How can she be fine if she’s smoking ‘blow’ all the time? Are you intending to try it?” Then she told me yes, probably she would, but her friend’s sister had “a really good dealer” so it would be OK. At which point I went in search of expert advice on how to talk to your kids about drugs without losing your temper.

That’s how I found myself perched on a child-sized plastic chair in a church hall in the first session of a course called “How to drug-proof your kids”. It is run by the charity, Care For the Family, an organisation with a broad remit to “strengthen family life”. The course began by asking us how prevalent we thought drug use was in 15 to 16-year-olds. We all vastly overestimated the figures (although they were several years old, and European, not confined to the UK). For example, the figure for those who had tried speed was only 2 per cent, while we had guessed 40 per cent. This exercise aimed to give us a sense of proportion, so that when kids say, as mine did, “Everybody tries it,” we can say, no, actually, they don’t. But how far this goes in preventing kids from trying drugs remains to be seen.

Spelling out the risks can help

The course syllabus aims to build a solid foundation and an open but clearly defined relationship with your kids, to give them the knowledge and confidence to resist bad peer pressure. This looks great on paper, but I wonder how it translates to real life.

Ann Warburton, a mother of two who completed the six-week course in Merseyside, said she was worried before the course that she was unable to answer tricky drug-related questions posed by her 12-year-old son. “For example, he might ask, what is the difference between taking paracetamol to feel better and taking Ecstasy? And I would say, I know the effect of paracetamol because it has been tested and you don’t know if the Ecstasy will make you feel better because you don’t know what is in it, where it came from.” The fact that one is legal and the other isn’t doesn’t seem to come into it because it doesn’t appear to be a big concern of the kids.

Warburton adds: “I tell him I can’t physically stop him from taking drugs, but I can tell him the risks. He has learnt that if his friends are trying to get him to take them, he has the confidence to say, ‘You’re off your head. Sod off’.”

Life Education Centres, a charity that works with primary schools and parents delivering courses on healthy living, also tackles drug issues from the wider scope of improving family communication. One mother of five, who prefers not to be named, says she was prompted to go on the course after her eldest son, 18, “went out of control” with drinking and drugs, and is now in prison. “I didn’t want that to happen to my other children. I don’t lecture them as such, because that doesn’t work, but if we are watching The Bill and a storyline about a drug overdose comes up, I will use that as a starting point for discussion. And I will point out that people might say drugs are good, but there is a negative side.”

There is also a negative side to drug education, whether it is delivered in schools, through media campaigns or “informal” parent-child chats. The charity Drugscope says: “The impact of drug education on drug-using behaviour is limited. Drug education is unlikely to prevent young people from experimenting with drugs.” The recent report by the new UK Drugs Policy Commission, An Analysis of UK Drugs Policy, was also sceptical of a prevention-centred policy. It said: “There is as yet no clear evidence showing prevention has had (this) effect in the UK.”

Even the Home Office’s Blueprint initiative, a schools-based drug education programme “driven by principles of effective practice”, damns itself with faint praise. “Drug education can achieve at least modest reductions in drug use and may also delay the onset of drug use,” it says. Can it be that kids are suffering from an overdose of drug information and that perhaps the best way to escape all these “informed choices” and “harm reduction” palaver is to get high?

Francis Gilbert, a secondary school teacher and author of The New School Rules (Piatkus Books, £10.99), says: “Kids get jaded with too much advice, which is not to say that information is not important, but don’t ram it down their throats. We know that scare tactics don’t work and ‘Just say no’ doesn’t work. I think parents should be honest about their fears.” Hmm, even this has its limitations. I did tell my daughter that I feared she would not “get on” with cannabis because she is a very anxious child, and smoking would either increase her anxiety (as it did mine) or work rather too well, which would make her see it as some sort of solution. She answered, evenly: “That might be so. But it might not.” I did not tell her my biggest fear, which is that for all my good parental intentions, the power of peer pressure, particularly in “Crackney”, will always be greater than the merits of good parent-child communication. And the advice on peer pressure hasn’t changed since I was a kid.

“Do as I do” not “Do as I say”

Peter Stoker, the founder of the National Drug Prevention Alliance, which also runs parenting courses, says: “If your child thinks that their friends will reject them for not doing drugs, you need to ask him, ‘Are they the sort of people you want as friends?’ ” Well, the answer may be “yes”, if they are the only friends he’s got.

A better way to increase resistance to negative peer pressure – and virtually all of those working on the front line of drug prevention would agree with this – is to improve the child’s sense of confidence, resilience and self-esteem. Paul Francis, a youth worker and author of Help Your Kids Stay Drug-Free (www.careforthefamily.org.uk , £2.99), says that people with healthy self-esteem “are happy to be part of the crowd but not necessarily to follow just because everybody else is”. The other main preventive strategy that all experts agree on is that “Do as I do” is better than “Do as I say.” Kids have a finely tuned radar for hypocrisy. If you don’t want them to drink excessively, smoke and do soft drugs, then don’t drink excessively and smoke and do soft drugs.

Useful contacts www.careforthefamily.org.uk www.lifeeducation.org.uk www.drugprevent.demon.co.uk www.talktofrank.com

Bright futures that can go up in smoke

Drugs may have been a rite of passage but CELIA BRAYFIELD says, don’t be a parent who’s part of the problem

Tom was a clever, creative, witty and good-looking kid. When he was 16 he fell for a beautiful, messed-up girl and they spent a lot of time lying around, smoking dope. Tom’s parents thought she was lovely and that a bit of blow never did anyone any harm. “We were old hippies,” his mother admits. “We thought it was harmless.” Month by month, their son lost his mind but it was hard for them to separate drug-induced psychosis from normal teenage rebellion. Tom was eventually sectioned. He’s a flinching, resentful wreck who has never held a job and will need antipsychotic medicine for the rest of his life.

He’s not the only one. Middle-class cannabis casualties are everywhere in my peer group. Fred had his first seizure after a crafty smoke at the bus stop on his way to school. Michael was violent and ineducable by 14 and will also need antipsychotics for life. Michael’s dad smokes his own homegrown weed all the time. He doesn’t have much else to do since for him, too, a bright future has gone up in smoke.

In many of these family tragedies the parents were part of the problem. Drugs were integral to their growing-up. Cannabis in particular was the first base of the transgressive behaviour that was considered a normal rite of passage. Those who have escaped a harsh, repressive family want to be their kids’ best friends, which means that Dad takes his son for his first joint instead of his first pint. They’re desperate to be cool but they’ve failed to spot the difference between weed grown on their windowsill and the industrially cultured skunk on the street. Professor Robin Murray, of the Institute of Psychiatry, compares them by saying that skunk is like drinking a bottle of vodka a day while homegrown is like a glass of wine at the weekend.

Perhaps the first advice to a parent on giving children the drugs chat is to get the facts right. The number of people admitted to hospital with mental health problems caused by cannabis has risen 65 per cent in the past five years; 80 per cent of new cases of psychosis are drug-related and about a quarter of the population have a genetic vulnerability. The mental health charity SANE says that a bit of blow is “like playing Russian roulette with your mind”.

I asked a young woman who’d grown up without getting into drugs what her parents did right. “They treated me like an adult who could make a sensible decision for myself,” she said. “And they didn’t use drugs themselves. Then at school they showed us a police film with a boy who’d been stabbed in the eyes by his girlfriend when she was tripping. That was it, really.”

Doing drugs by numbers

24% of children aged 11 to 15 have tried drugs; 55 per cent have tried alcohol; 39 per cent have smoked cigarettes

35% of 11 to 15-year-olds report having been offered drugs, down 7 per cent since 2001

4% of 11 to 15 year olds have taken class A drugs in the past year

8% of 15-year-olds take drugs once a month

Source: Smoking, drinking and drug use among young people in England in 2006, commissioned by The Information Centre

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