No Reason to Be Sanguine about Teenage Drug Use

Kathy Gyngell - Research Fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies - comments on the National Treatment Agency’s report ‘Getting to grips with substance misuse among young people: the data for 2007/08’

Last week the NTA published the staggering figure of nearly 25,000
young people under 18 getting treatment for their drugs and alcohol problems.(1) Up some 8,000 on just a year and a half ago, this, they insist, is not a refl ection of a growing problem but just one of expanding services.

This does not, however, leave me feeling much happier. Ten years ago the thought of so many young teenagers using drugs to this degree was unimaginable. Yet the evidence of the continuing catastrophic levels of school age drug use suggests that should ‘services’ go on to double or treble, demand will take that up too.

The sad fact is that, despite ten years of a drug strategy purportedly designed to reduce use by young people, there are thousands of children beginning their lives so damaged by drugs that they need treatment.

Whatever the spin put on these fi gures, this is a major social problem that can neither be denied nor brushed under the carpet. What teenagers do today determines the scale of the drugs problem tomorrow.

But, as ever in the rose tinted world of British drugs policy, we are told by the great and the good that there is nothing much for us to worry about.

Drugscope’s sanguine response to the fi gures was that, “Public and media perceptions of the numbers of young people misusing drugs and alcohol can be distorted. Yet the picture painted by prevalence data ……. all suggest that the numbers of young people using drugs and alcohol are falling”.(2)

However, the national school age statistics on drugs use, which Drugscope portrays as revealing this good news, still show that a staggering 25% of the UK’s school age children (11 – 15) have tried drugs - fi gures that are way higher than the European average - and that 10% of them are using drugs regularly.(3) The last comparable survey fi gures for European school children under 15 also showed UK to have 13% of our under 13s having tried cannabis against a European average of 4%.(4) It is also the case that, while the trend for schoolchildren’s drug use remained stable across Europe between 1999 and 2005, in the UK it doubled. Although UK school childrens’ drug of choice, cannabis, appears to have now stabilised, their cocaine consumption has been rising – unheard of elsewhere in Europe.

But it is also likely that levels of teenage cannabis use are higher than the published statistics state, as the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs recently acknowledged. In their view the British Crime Survey is likely for a range of reasons to underestimate it. Even so, these estimates show that some 12% of 16 -19 year olds are regular users and that 20% of them have used it in the last year.(5)

A percentage point decline in cannabis use in official statistics is small comfort for parents or for schools. Hospital admissions show that this small gain has been wiped out by the rising strength of cannabis and by the fact that children are moving earlier to Class A drugs. In fact with the UK cannabis market dominated by high THC skunk, which, according to a former head of the Dutch Police Narcotics Division, should now count as a ‘hard drug’, what we are witnessing is an ever earlier and disturbing shift to hard drug use. To dismiss such concerns as distorted perceptions is really not on. As any ‘in touch’ parent of a teenager in central London knows, regular cannabisusing kids are moving to cocaine, ketamine and ecstasy by the time they are 16 or 17. Many teenagers appear to be immune to drug dangers despite the endless compulsory personal health and social education classes that they are subjected to at school. Nor has the government’s mixed message about drugs helped – namely their explicit policy statements about the non harmful nature of ‘recreational’ and casual drug use; no more helpful is their confused ‘informed choice’ approach to drugs education.

The appalling truth, as far as adults are concerned, is that we seem to have surrendered to a sense of ‘inevitability’ about children’s drug use.

While drugs services and drugs advisors have no more urgent need than to highlight “the problems faced by young people when they reach 18 and are no longer eligible for specialist services” and “to ease their transition to adult services”, the outlook is dire indeed.

The NTA’s tables reveal that 1600 teenagers are receiving treatment for heroin, cocaine and crack addiction and that 29% - some 6000 in all of those in treatment - are now receiving ‘harm reduction’ interventions – usually understood to be a euphemism for prescribing an opiate substitute like subutex or methadone. As Professor Neil McKeganey, a leading expert in drugs misuse has said: ‘The idea of starting someone under 18 on a methadone prescription with an implicit expectation that they may be on that drug for the next ten or more years is appalling. We need services to think beyond the chemical inducement into therapy.’(6)

The desperate fact though, is that there is still only one small dedicated residential rehabilitation centre with statutory funding for no more than 12 children/ teenagers at a time in the country. Last year Mike Trace, Chief Executive of RAPT – the Rehabilitation of Addicted Prisoners Trust – spoke of the urgent need for residential treatment for young, under 18, addicts.(7) Young addicts, he said, were unlikely to get better within the environment in which they had grown up and that had fed their problems. Any parent of a young addict knows just how truly he spoke.

But how much of the National Treatment Agency’s dedicated funding of £25 million is being spent on this? How many teenagers are emerging drug free from their encounters with services? How effective are the disparate psychosocial interventions, pharmacological prescribing interventions, specialist harm reduction, and family interventions on offer? It is simply not enough for the NTA to tell us that the proportion of young intervention according to the goals set out in their care plans’ is 57%. Unless we know what the goals of their care plans are in the first place and what the aspirations are for the young people in question, it is a pretty meaningless statement. As we already know from adult services ‘completing treatment’ may be a measure of virtually nothing.

References

(1) Getting to Grips with substance misuse amongst young people: data for 2007/8. NTA January 22nd 2008

(2) Drugscope Press Release 22nd January 2008

(3) Drug Use, Smoking and drinking among young people in England 2007, NHS, The Information Centre

(4) EMCDDA Drug use and related problems among very young people (under 15 years old), 2007

(5) Cannabis classification and public health, ACMD 2008

(6) Addictions, Vol 4, Breakthrough Britain

(7) BBC News 20.09.08