FDS Insight Newsletter Jul-Sep 2020

8 This view pervades the government approach to both recreational and problematic drug use – indeed it makes no distinction between the two. Having confronted both, my hard-won view is that drug use is not criminal because it is corrupting – it is corrupting, where it is, very largely because it is criminal. A war on drugs turns out to be, as Michael Douglas’s character in Traffic observed, a war on our children. And we are expected to take up arms. The solution offered in this television campaign and more generally by the government to the problems presented by drug use is to block that use. The government for its part, as we know, is trying to prevent drug use through law enforcement. It is proudly ‘tough on drugs’. The government booklet reinforces the message that we parents need to be tough on drugs too. We have to make it clear to our children that we won’t tolerate their using drugs and we have to make it clear that the rules apply not just at home but wherever they are. We must not assume that they know this, and we must not assume that our children are not at risk. As the advertisements show, kids from good homes use drugs too. But the clear message is that good parents can block the risk by talking about the dangers of drug use, pointing out its criminal nature, and setting firm rules. If we give our children the information they require, they will be less likely to rely on misinformation from friends or from those who seek to recruit them into drug use. ‘Who is talking to your kids about drugs?’ the ads intone. It had better be us. It seems to me that there is a serious internal tension in this campaign to get parents to talk openly about drugs with their teenage children in a climate of criminal prohibition and moral panic. Moreover, the government is confused about the proper processes, aims and outcomes of genuine open discussion with one’s children. A so-called conversation in which parents seek to impress on their children the dangers of drug taking, in a single-minded effort to dissuade or protect them from experimentation, is likely to be short and unproductive. Parents, according my sixteen-year-old daughter, are the last people you would talk to about drugs: they don’t know what they’re talking about, and if they did approach the subject with them, they would start to worry that you were taking drugs and increase their surveillance of you. If they found out you had taken drugs, they would ‘go ballistic’. The information in the drug booklet that is supposed to be a resource for parents in these conversations is hopelessly one- sided and it therefore lacks credibility in our children’s eyes. Certainly, a quick read of the list of ‘symptoms’ of use of the different drugs make it utterly mysterious why anyone would ever be tempted to take them. The booklet for the most part carefully skirts the reasons why most ordinary kids try drugs, namely that it’s reputed to be fun and that it often is fun. So on the one hand, as my daughter pointed out, you have the booklet with its unrelenting focus on the bad effects of drugs plus a bit of jargon designed to obscure descriptions of the pleasurable effects; on the other hand, you have your friends, who are