Dr. Sharon Lambert:

I have strong views on this and they are not my views; they are based on research. There is no such thing as a neutral intervention. Every time one does something with children it has an impact. What some studies have found is that drug prevention education actually harms vulnerable young people. This form of education may be introducing information to them that they did not have yet. It might have been coming but they did not have it yet. We also know that the "say no to drugs" message, which has been around since the 1950s, has not worked and is clearly not working. Drug prevention must be seen in the context of mental health. We must talk about all that goes with that and not just drugs on their own. Otherwise, we are stigmatising people who use drugs and are placing them as being somehow separate than if I was talking about being kind on social media. All of these things impact on mental health. It should be integrated into well-being that currently exists, rather than targeting people. We also know that, for example, programmes in the past that targeted young people who were deemed at risk but had not yet committed an offence or participated in that behaviour, increased risk. What you are doing is saying to the community that this young person is a problem and although the problem has not presented yet, this is what we think of them. They become stigmatised as a result of that and it increases their risk.