Psychologist says scare tactics on drug abuse fail

THE most successful programmes for tackling drug abuse among young people are based on developing social skills and entail more than providing information, a conference in Galway was told.

Scare tactics which exaggerate the consequences of drug misuse do not work, according to Dr Mark Morgan, a psychologist at St Patrick's Training College, Dublin.

Simply providing information on drugs was highly unlikely to prevent substance experimentation, and might even be counterproductive.

The conference yesterday on "Adolescents - Coping with Adversity", was organised by the Irish Association of Care Workers and the Western Health Board.

Dr Morgan called for more research into programmes to counter drug abuse. Knowledge did not necessarily lead to prevention of abuse, he said, and in one study it had been found to be counter productive.

"Since the mid 1980s, the social skills/competency approach has become especially influential. This method is based on the assumption that individuals develop problems with substances because they lack particular social skills that would enable them to withstand pressure to experiment."

Young people should be taught the skills to cope with influences which are brought to bear on them in interpersonal situations and in the media.

Emphasis on immediate social consequences was likely to be more effective than highlighting the long term consequences, he said. "Adolescents are more likely to be influenced by knowing that cigarettes cause bad breath than knowing they may cause lung cancer.

Scaring young people by exaggeration of the consequences tended not only to be ineffective, but to undermine the credibility of other aspects of a programme, Dr Morgan said.

The head of the department of social studies in Trinity College, Dublin, Mr Robbie Gilligan, said that for all the provisions in the Child Care Act, very little money, had been earmarked for adolescent services "beyond a heavy investment in locking up a tiny number of them in what will be horrifically expensive and euphemistically termed high support units.