Christmas and New Year is a time of much excitement and celebration. New Year’s parties happen just about everywhere, and where there are parties, there is usually alcohol, and where there is alcohol, you may often find drugs. Unfortunately, the rate of drug overdose in the New Year period is 1.28 times higher in England and Wales than in non-holiday periods (Lewer et al., 2023) – a sobering fact that reminds us that we’re not invincible when alcohol might make us think otherwise. This is particularly true of children and adolescents, who might let peer pressure and occasion get in the way of their better judgement.
Between April 2022 and March 2023, 12,418 people under the age of 18 were in contact with alcohol and drug services. Of these young people, 87% came to treatment for cannabis use, 44% said they had problems with alcohol, and 9% reported problems with cocaine. 79% began using substances before the age of 15, and 56% reported using multiple substances.
Usage of illicit substances during childhood has been shown to result in increased likelihood of developing an adult substance disorder (Arteaga et al., 2010), interacting with the judiciary system (Hajizadeh et al., 2017), developing a psychiatric disorder (Hajizadeh et al., 2017), having a lower level of educational attainment (Hajizadeh et al., 2017), having a reduced level of employment (Arria et al., 2012), and committing violence (Bennett et al., 2008; Zhong et al., 2020).
“Theatre in Education” is the practice of using theatre to support educational goals. It typically manifests in trained actors or educators delivering story-based drama performances which illustrate and explore social issues which arise at various points of childhood and adolescence. One way they can be used is to prepare children for resisting social pressures that may lead them into engaging in harmful or self-destructive behaviours, such as drug use or other risk-taking activities that may result from peer pressure or other contextual factors. As such, they seek to ingrain a set of norms or practices that deter or prevent the audience from generating harm to themselves or others.
Unity Insights is currently conducting a cost-benefit analysis of a Theatre in Education program in Brighton being delivered to 12–14-year-olds on the normalisation of drug use by school peers, and what can be done to avoid the onset of drug use. By exploring the effects of adolescent drug use in the domains of education, employment, health, and law, we’re striving to expand our repertoire of services and provide unique, longitudinal, multidimensional insights that can support the expansion of programs targeting the reduction of drug use in young people.
References
Arria, A., Garnier-Dykstra, L., Cook, E., Caldeira, K., Vincent, K., Baron, R., & O’Grady, K. (2012). Drug use patterns in young adulthood and post-college employment. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 127. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2012.06.001
Arteaga, I., Chen, C.-C., & Reynolds, A. J. (2010). Childhood predictors of adult substance abuse. Children and Youth Services Review, 32(8), 1108–1120. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2010.04.025
Bennett, T., Holloway, K., & Farrington, D. (2008). The statistical association between drug misuse and crime: A meta-analysis. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 13(2), 107–118. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2008.02.001
Hajizadeh, N., Stevens, E. R., Applegate, M., Huang, K.-Y., Kamboukos, D., Braithwaite, R. S., & Brotman, L. M. (2017). Potential return on investment of a family-centered early childhood intervention: A cost-effectiveness analysis. BMC Public Health, 17(1), 796. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-017-4805-7
Lewer, D., Brothers, T. D., Gasparrini, A., & Strang, J. (2023). Seasonal, weekly and other cyclical patterns in deaths due to drug poisoning in England and Wales. Addiction, 118(8), 1596–1601. https://doi.org/10.1111/add.16175
Zhong, S., Yu, R., & Fazel, S. (2020). Drug Use Disorders and Violence: Associations With Individual Drug Categories. Epidemiologic Reviews, 42(1), 103–116. https://doi.org/10.1093/epirev/mxaa006