|
DRINK & DRUGS NEWS :: Q&AYou ask the questions - you answer the questions. Please keep your answers coming, and feel free to email a new question. Thanks to this issue's respondents for their contributions. Question:I have a friend who is worried about her son. He is showing
an interest in drugs and they've had several arguments where he
takes the line 'it's not use that's bad it's abuse'. His school
work is slipping, he and his friends are increasingly dishevelled
in appearance and we are convinced he is smoking cannabis, if not
more. Whilst I can appreciate that experimentation is a teenager's
right how on earth can we get him to stay on the straight and narrow
for just one more year until he sits his GCSEs? [Lorraine, Bristol] Your replies...Dear Lorraine, I think on one level it is hard to argue against your son's point about use and abuse. However, it seems to me that the patterns of behaviour he is exhibiting point to the fact that his use has already become 'abuse'. The problem of course, is that people become locked into dependencies on substances gradually and are usually reluctant to admit that until the cost to their wellbeing is too painful to avoid. This may well take a lot longer than might seem obvious to the outsider. It is not at all unusual for your son to deny that his use of cannabis (if that is what it is, and you haven't said in your letter what has led you to believe this) is a problem: we seem, in the UK, to have fooled ourselves into thinking that this is a virtually harmless drug, despite the truth being played out in front of our eyes. A recent Danish study showed that cannabis users held these myths about the drug: Cannabis is harmless, at least relatively, and most of the negatives spoken about the drug are wrong or trivial. It is tranquillising and any feelings of paranoia it produces are temporary and unimportant. It improves your thinking and creativity, eases the weight of the demands placed upon you by your surroundings, and makes you free of worrying. At the same time the user often feels misunderstood, unique and different from others, lonely and unsuccessful but internalises and owns these feelings: they do not associate them to the use of the drug. Meanwhile they are often exhibiting many of the following behaviours: problems with putting words to feelings or emotions; feelings of boredom and emptiness, and of being misunderstood and lonely; externalisation of problems; difficulties in evaluating their own performance and the practice of self-criticism; problems in maintaining a dialogue, being attentive, and concentrating; difficulty with planning and having structure or routines in life; feeling different from everybody else, giving stereotyped answers and opinions; feeling incompetent and unsuccessful; and being forgetful and likely to miss appointments. The task is clear: to connect the user to the realities of the second list by dispensing with the myths of the first. The challenge is to do this while the very cognitive processes that are required for such a realisation are themselves impaired by the use of cannabis. Until you can be sure that your son is using cannabis it will be difficult to engage with this problem, but you might begin with asking him to define what he means by abuse: what would that look like; how would someone know that they were abusing a drug? Learn about cannabis yourselves and think about how you can discuss the issue without everybody ending up in immovable, conflicted positions. In-volve can provide you with appropriate literature with ideas on how to do this, as can a number of other agencies: try contacting FRANK or Drugscope. Talk to your local branch of Adfam who are there to support people like yourselves and not just the families of heroin users as many people assume. Ideally, get your son to contact one of our services or your local young people's substance misuse service if there is one near you. However, I think you have some preparatory work to do first: he won't consider getting help at your behest if he won't even admit that he's using. There is, unfortunately, no quick fix that will ensure the problem is dealt with before his exams. Indeed many young people say the pressure of exams is one of the reasons they smoke cannabis. We'd need to hear more about the specifics of your son's case before we could say anything more definite but do please feel free to contact us directly. Details are on our website. Colin Cripps, deputy CEO, In-volve. The website is at www.in-volve.org.uk
Dear Lorraine Communicating with teenagers is an extremely difficult thing to do. On the one hand if you try and talk to them from an adult's perspective and (you hope) give them the benefit of your experience, they will no doubt write you off as a patronising old fuddy duddy; whereas if you try and communicate with them on their level, you run a very great risk of sounding like you are trying to be 'down with the kidz' and run the risk of embarrassing both yourself and them. The best thing that your friend can do is arm herself with information on cannabis (and all drugs) and make herself available if her son wishes to talk. By knowing the facts around the drug you are then able to pass on constructive measured advice that may be listened to and taken seriously. The worst possible thing that you can do is overreact, young people have a very sophisticated knowledge of drugs and telling a 15 year old that if he smokes cannabis he will fail his exams and ruin his life will not wash. Good luck. Mary, Northants
|
|
