A Guidance Teacher's Views

Peter Glanton,

Assistant Head Teacher at Dumfries High School. He teaches English and Guidance. In this article Peter shares his thoughts after watching 'Sorted" with pupils at his school.

As part of the SSBA's 'Drug Awareness Campaign' a poster entitled "What Drugs Look Like" has been included in this edition of Grapevine. It contains pictures of the various substances used and misused by those who take drugs and gives a brief description of their composition and effects. It is intended to be a visual aid to parents who may have little idea of the physical appearance of drugs, their shapes, colours, textures.

Police, social workers, teachers, those who work with young people who have become involved with drugs will offer you other, very different, images of what drugs look like. To them, drugs may look like the frequently bewildered, often naive, sometimes terrified boys and girls who have found themselves sucked in to a pattern of behaviour which denies them control over their own lives, aware that what had seemed bold and adventurous has quickly turned sour, sordid and dangerous. They know that in using drugs or in allowing themselves to become the agency through which friends can acquire drugs they have themselves been used.

Whether those who deal drugs do so to finance a personal habit or to make money, they are stake holders in an industry dedicated to the cynical exploitation of the naive and vulnerable; and there is little realistic possibility of ever countering the drugs problem until we acknowledge the truth that drugs are, literally, big business, marketed on the streets, in clubs, at school gates, with an expertise in selling, knowledge of the consumer and maximising of profits that in more legitimate lines might earn the pusher an award for industry.

To put it more dramatically, the godfathers of dope have declared war on our children.

They have invested vast sums in the campaigns of exploitation while we, the body-count relentlessly rising and the psychologically maimed multiplying in their distress have come terrifyingly close to accommodating drugs as a condition of modern life, to accepting them as perils to be lived with, crossing our fingers and hoping that their next victim will not be our own child.

But it will be, because each child is our child; these young people are all our children. Our obligations to the young are not restricted to those within our own immediate family or school. They are universal; the loss of any child deprives us all.

The video, 'Sorted", is so remarkably effective because of the simple eloquence with which it reminds us of that. There is nothing artificial in its production or in its concerns. The story of a real life and a real death, its pain is raw; you cannot watch it and be unmoved. More remarkable yet, it is also an instrument of hope because what "Sorted" demonstrates is that our young are not lost to us, that it is possible to communicate effectively with them, that the values of the Ecstasy culture, of the drug culture in general, can be challenged, confronted and contradicted. It neither preaches at nor patronises its audience, uses nothing remotely gimmicky in the way of production values, and thereby stands as the best lesson many of us will ever have seen in a classroom. It would be naive to suppose that a sea-change has occurred in the behaviour of the pupils and students who have watched it and had the opportunity to discuss their reactions to it, but something significant has happened which those who determine education policy, those especially who determine where and in what quantity resources are to be allocated, must be made aware of.

Put very simply, the war declared by drugs is costing us lives, the real lives of our young people.

The video 'Sorted" is available in schools.