Mr. Jim Doherty:

There has been a long-standing lack of participation from the Department of education. As we have flagged previously, anyone who is working with drugs in any capacity would immediately think of young people as being a group that is one of the most vulnerable and important to work with. While there are lots of people who work very well with local youth services and individual schools, there is a real lack of support from the Department of education to have an overall and consistent approach to working with young people. It is a glaring omission from the work of the task forces and from the real implementation work of the national drugs strategy. I understand that there is going to be an increased focus on prevention work this time in the strategy and we welcome that. The key player in prevention work has to be the Department of education and all the structures that go along with it. The Department of education should be occupying a similar role to the Department of Health in the national drugs strategy. Perhaps the Department of justice should too.

I have a point to make in response to the previous things that were said. The Department is relying on a resource allocation model these days. It is very important to note that, although it has always been there, since the last strategy in particular we have seen an entire class of new people becoming victims of drug use, namely, families being intimidated for drug-related debts.

There is a real risk that such families and statistics do not show up in the resource allocation model which is built much more on sociodemographic grounds. That is a critical, glaring omission that needs to be corrected.