Recovery Ramblings

The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs Recovery Committee has published a useful review of the evidence around Prevention.

This matters because prevention is often grossly misunderstood, sometimes by policy makers but especially by the media.

The assumption is often made that substance misuse and addiction can be prevented if only more information was made available - if we ‘educate’ young people about drugs they will not take them.

This is not borne out by the science. This view rests on an innacurate or insufficient understanding of how and why people make decisions - it is an ‘information deficit model’. An information deficit model assumes that we make bad decisions because we don’t have enough information so if we give more information we will make better decisions.

Life is not like that, people are not like that. There are fascinating research cases where young people are given more information about drugs and use this information to make decisions to take more drugs. Making the information scary doesn’t work either, so sending policemen and ‘recoverying addicts’ to tell horror stories does not appear to work.

Getting this right is important. Getting prevention strategies wrong can actually increase the problems you are trying to solve - so it is even worse than doing nothing.

The good news, there is increasingly robust evidence that some prevention strategies actually work. Take a look at the paper!