I Watched Former Drug Addicts Give a Reality Check to Schoolkids in London

Britain has the highest rate of cocaine use among school-age kids in Europe, the highest rates for early drunkenness, and higher than most rates for cannabis, ecstasy, and general addictive drug use.

The overall picture is in fact not as bad as it might sound—like most of the developed world, teenage drug use in the UK has been falling over the last 15 years, probably as a result of a mixture of wider factors. Parents are being better parents and teenagers are punching in their status updates at home instead of talking face to face while sniffing butane through shirt sleeves in the local park.

Nevertheless, it's still an issue and kids still need to be informed. Looking at the measly amount of drug education British schoolchildren get, you'd think there was no problem at all. Drug education has been battered by cuts over the last decade. The modern schoolkid will have had only an hour of basic, scientific drug facts or hoary old scare stories by the time they leave school at 16. Being educated about drugs in a personal, real-life context is not on the school curriculum.

This is where the Amy Winehouse Foundation (AWF) is trying to make a difference. Today marks the fourth anniversary of the sad death from alcohol poisoning of Amy Winehouse, aged 27. Apart from a back catalogue of amazing songs and a film about her, one of her legacies is the AWF—a Big Lottery funded charity set up by Amy's parents Mitch and Janis, two months after her death to educate young people, especially disadvantaged kids, about drugs and alcohol.

Last week I went to a secondary school in Enfield, a racially diverse London borough with a mix of deprivation and affluence and a key flashpoint of the 2011 London riots, to see the AWF in action. Would Amy leave a legacy of decent drugs education, or would her Foundation just regurgitate the same old "Just Say No"–style scare stories that became popular in the 1980s and which to some extent are repeated by current anti-drug campaigns?

As I arrived, around 100 pupils aged 13 and 14 at this boy's grammar school, mainly black and Asian, were sat in their assembly hall in front of an image of Amy Winehouse on a projector screen. The school is a few streets from where Amy was brought up. These kids were nine or ten years old when she died, but they knew who she was.

Sue Coates, a woman in her forties from Enfield is one of AWF's coordinators. She asked the kids how you spot a drug addict. The first pupil to put his hand up said, "smells of urine." The next one said "stubble." It was at this point that Sue admitted she had been addicted to drugs, mainly alcohol and cocaine, for 25 years. "A drug addict is not just the person on the park bench, it could be anyone, including me."

The pupils listened to Sue as she told them about how at their age she felt lost and lonely, with low self-esteem, an absent father and a brother who beat her up all the time. She did anything to get attention, such as stealing and getting pissed. "I didn't feel good about myself. When I took drugs I felt amazing and when I stopped I realized it was a false world, the pain was still there."

Harry Sumnall, professor in Substance Use at the Center for Public Health at Liverpool John Moores University, describes drugs education as "patchy, really bad, with little relevance to young people's lives." Research has shown that knowledge of the bare facts about drugs does not really do much to help children's decision making, so the AWF's emphasis is all about talking through the emotional reasons why people become addicted to drugs.

Winehouse herself admitted in an interview shortly after overdosing on drugs in 2007 that her drug addiction had its roots in her teenage mental state. "Since I was 16, I've felt a black cloud hangs over me," she told German magazine Stern. "Since then, I have taken pills for depression. I believe there are lots of people who have these mood changes."

George, a 23-year-old guy from Essex, who is an AWF volunteer, spoke next. Just ten years older than them, George opened up to the rows of staring, uniformed school children. He got into drugs because of a mix of things, including a violent, alcoholic father, which left him petrified of school and uncomfortable in his own skin.

"I can remember the feeling like it was yesterday," said George. "I thought that everyone was better than me. I didn't know who I was. I tried to fit in, with the football boys, the cool kids, the smokers. I was desperate. I hurt other kids to feel better about myself."

George left school at 16 to work in a nightclub, where his addiction to drink and drugs continued until one day he realized he couldn't live like that any more. He turned to his father, who had got off drink and stopped hitting his wife, for help, ended up on a 12-step drug program and has been five years sober.

"Taking drugs gave me the same feeling as shoplifting, it took me out of myself, it took away the fear, stopped my stomach churning, so I carried on doing it. I didn't want to talk about why I was so unhappy with anyone, because then it would become real."

The kids were completely wrapped up in George's story. He was touching on fears and insecurities many teenagers have. They were genuinely concerned: Was he still in touch with his family? Is he still tempted to drink or take drugs? Worried about his friends who take drugs? Could he not have talked to a teacher?

Ex-drug users have been coming into schools to give talks for years, but what seemed to make this work was steering clear of dramatic, "descent into hell" stories. According to Harry Sumnall, "Sometimes you have ex-users talking about how they smoked some cannabis and before long they're injecting heroin and selling sex. Few young people can relate to this and in fact it can be counterproductive."

Sure, there is a bit of the workshop where Sue rehashes some hoary old myths about drugs containing "dog poo and rat poison" and people "putting heroin in cannabis to make it addictive," but it's only a momentary slip into scare-story territory.

A quick straw poll of the pupils revealed almost all of them had taken either tobacco or alcohol, a third knew someone who had taken or sold illegal drugs, but none of them admitted to having taken illegal drugs themselves. The official statistics show one in six 11 to 15-year-olds have taken drugs, but I don't blame them for not owning up. One of them seemed particularly clued up on the current purity of cocaine and rising popularity of codeine and Xanax.

What the AWF is doing is progress, but in today's confusing drug market of mystery white powders and pills, the need for older secondary school children to be given straight-up harm-reduction advice about safe drug use is more pressing than ever. It wasn't long ago that Tony Blair and the News of the World were calling on all schools to have sniffer dogs and subject their pupils to random drug tests. We've avoided that train wreck, but with social exclusion on the rise and families at breaking point because of austerity, now's the time for the government to firm up its drug education. Those most at risk need the knowledge and skills to avoid fucking their lives up with bad drugs decisions.

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