Youth and drugs/drink

Are we missing the point when it comes to talking to our children about drink and drugs? Is the real problem the UK’s cultural legacy?

It appears that, once again, the messages we are giving our young children are not going in – what a surprise! When will we ever learn that the Don’t do it, it’s bad for you! does not good at all.

To stop this epidemic we need to think deeper and be a little wiser and clever.

For each person their addiction will be for different reasons.

• Perhaps they feel like their life is going nowhere
• Perhaps it is how they see their parents handle their problems
• Maybe they do not know another outlet
• Perhaps their pain is so great that they want to numb it

So the question is not how we stop our young people drinking but how we support them to know why they are drinking and deal with that…. and then there is something much more ingrained that we need to address.

Our cultural legacy in the UK. We are, let’s face it, a nation that abuses alcohol. We have pubs set up for that very purpose – where else in Europe can you find a UK style Pub? Our magazines and papers showing pictures of this and that celebrity very drunk. Even our young Princes have been caught the worse for wear a few times. We cannot, on one hand, tell our teenagers not to drink and on the other, have a culture that supports and sometimes even celebrates drinking. How many times does a stressed adult say, “Gosh, I need a drink”?

Until we accept that the problem is not youth, not 24-hour drinking, not Alco pops, it is a cultural legacy that we have, then nothing that we do will work.