Course curriculum including testimonials from addicts, health workers and cops would bring big benefits for not very much cost

Author of the article:  Herbert Grubel, Special to Financial Post  (Canada) –  Published Aug 22, 2024

Last year British Columbia recorded 2,511 deaths suspected of being caused by illicit drugs, an average of nearly seven per day and an increase of five per cent from 2022. That’s a blemish on Canadian society and a cause of deep frustration: no matter how hard our governments and private charities have tried, we have not been able to end this carnage.

There has been no shortage of effort. To shrink the total number of users, we punish the possession, production, importation and dealing of drugs with fines and prison. To shrink the number of deaths caused by use of contaminated needles and drugs, we have provided safe injection sites and, in some provinces, free, safe opioids. To save users who have overdosed, we have made Naloxone readily available and put emergency medical teams on standby to take them to hospitals for treatment. To get users to give up their addiction, we offer them free mental health care and rehabilitation services.

What else can we do? We live in a free society. We cannot jail users or enrol them against their will in rehabilitation. We can always improve existing policies and apply more resources to them, but we may well have reached the limits of these policies in terms of financial commitment and political acceptability.

There is one policy, however, that has not been tried in Canada: Require all young Canadians to learn about the risk of death and other harms from using addictive recreational drugs and make them document their knowledge of these risks to receive their high-school graduation diploma.

This would not affect the current number of addicts but it should reduce the number of Canadians who become addicts in the future. Young people who understand the consequences of addiction will be better able to resist social pressures, sales pitches from drug dealers and the temptation to self-medicate the mental and emotional turmoil that afflicts many teenagers.

We know that providing the public with information about the consequences of personal actions is effective. That is why we have information campaigns about the effects of teen pregnancies, drunk driving and hiking in the back country without proper gear. Health Canada conducts regular campaigns informing the public about the risks of certain lifestyle choices and the failure to get vaccinated against the threat of infections.

Canada has many teachers, psychologists and media experts who could produce a curriculum that could effectively provide students with information about the consequences and risks of drug use. One does not have to be an expert to imagine the contents of such a curriculum.

One set of lectures would involve testimonials from addicts, whether in person or via video, about how hard it is to get a regular supply of drugs and find the money to pay for them, and how addiction led to homelessness and broken relationships with family and friends. They would discuss the trauma of seeing friends go into comas or die and discovering that their own mental acuity and health are diminishing.

Accounts by addicts of how they were induced to try their first dose would also be important, as well as testimony about the fleeting and decreasing pleasures they get from each successive hit.

The school curriculum might also include medical professionals talking about their experiences dealing with overdose victims, their inability to revive many of them and the persistent damage to users’ quality of life and mental and physical health.

Films could show parts of cities where addicts live in misery, inject drugs and sprawl motionlessly on the ground while under the influence. They could show medics attending to addicts in distress, with ambulance lights flashing in the dark background. They could show family members and friends attending funerals and mourning the death of overdose victims, or addicts being taken to jail in handcuffs by the police after committing crimes against property and persons.

No doubt there would be opposition to such a policy from Canadians who do not want to see time taken away from teaching traditional subjects or who are concerned that their children will be traumatized by the presentations or perhaps even encouraged to try drugs. These are legitimate concerns that need to be addressed in public discussions and ultimately government-arranged hearings about the benefits and costs of the proposed policy — as should be the practice with all government policies. But it seems to me the returns to the drug-abuse education are so high we should at least have public discussions about it.

Financial Post

Herbert Grubel is an emeritus professor of economics at Simon Fraser University.

Source:  https://financialpost.com/opinion/make-drug-awareness-requirement-graduate-high-school