Dr. James O'Shea:

My colleagues, starting with Dr. Lambert, provided a really good model for drug prevention. They also highlighted the concerns. I spent five years of my life when I was much younger working as a drug education prevention officer for the old Eastern Health Board. Dr. Lambert's initial point, which should be a baseline consideration, is that at best most drug prevention programmes do not work and at worst they can do damage. Every penny the Government, the HSE or anybody else spends in supporting families and supporting communities is money spent on drug prevention because it is building resilience in communities and families.

Mr. Collins mentioned coping skills, resilience-building skills etc. Those are the skills we need to be teaching people because if people have good coping skills and good resilience, they do not need to self-medicate or take drugs. Even if they do, they know how to manage themselves out of it.

Finally, people like us should be kept out of schools because the people who are best placed to do education on drug awareness, health and social skills are teachers, youth workers, parents and peers. To go back to Dr. Lambert's point, for the most part the research and evidence would suggest that bringing in the guy from the HSE, AA or wherever actually increases levels of experimentation rather than decreases it. We are far better off resourcing the people who are already working with young people to do these drug prevention issues.