Peer pressure

If you like to believe your 13 year old isn't being exposed to drugs, chances are you are living in a dream world. Drugs are out there - and teenagers being teenagers, they are interested in them. Just like they're interested in anything that's forbidden. Matt Klar is a 15-year-old Year 10 pupil at York's Lowfield School. He's cool - and he hates drugs.

He was once offered 'e' in a club, but refused it. "The reason I didn't was because I had seen a story when I was younger," he says.

But, according to Matt, drugs are alarmingly easy to come by for any teenager daft enough to want to prove how big he or she is by experimenting.

"I know quite a lot of kids who go around buying stuff, " he says. "You can just go up and say 'can I buy so-and-so' and buy it straight away."

Because of the peer pressure on teenagers to be cool, it can be difficult to say no, Matt adds.

"If a townie (translation: a teenager who 'thinks he's hard') comes up and you say you don't want to try drugs they think you're a poof, weak or something."

Kate Roberts, a 15-year-old Year 10 pupil at Fulford School, agrees the pressure can be intense. "When you're in a big group of friends, trying to impress them, if they start, you will start too," she says.

Like Matt, Kate says she was never tempted. "I have always been told by my parents that they are really bad for your health," she says.

Not all teenagers, however, are as willing to listen to their parents.

The trouble is adults just aren't cool. We can bang on all we like to teenagers about the dangers of drugs, and most of them probably won't take a blind bit of notice.

As adults, we've crossed that dividing line that separates - as they see it - the idealism and impulsiveness of youth from the hypocrisy and compromise of middle age. So what do we know? We probably can't even send a text message.

Adults who try to meet teens on their own ground are probably even worse. Like, eugh!

So how do we stop our teenagers experimenting with drugs? If we really want to wake them up to the dangerous, ugly consequences, there's probably only one way. Get the kids themselves to do the teaching.

For the past couple of years, that's precisely what a growing number of secondary schools in York have been doing.

Year 10 pupils like Matt and Kate have been volunteering to take part in training weekends offered by local youth workers designed not only to teach them about the risks of drugs and alcohol but also to have the self-confidence to go off and pass the message on to teenagers younger than themselves.

Matt and Kate along with other Year 10 teenagers from the six secondary schools taking part - Millthorpe, Burnholme, Lowfield, Oakland's, Fulford and Canon Lee - have been going back into school as 'peer educators' to younger, Year 8 pupils. They have been sharing their experiences of coping with a teenage culture that can all-too-easily treat booze and drugs as cool.

Seema Jasim, a 15-year-old Year 10 pupil at Fulford School is another of the peer educators. She agrees that in teenage culture if you don't join in the street chat about drugs, it is easy to feel left out. "You're kind of ignored by other people."

But younger teenagers will listen to those who are a couple of years older than them in a way they won't listen to their parents or other adults, she says. "We say things they can relate to, and they will trust us more."

Kate agrees. "We have been through the same things they have," she says of the younger pupils she's been working with. "We go to the same places, know the same songs, like the same pop groups. And I can remember what it was like to be in Year 8. You were always quite pressured to try drugs.

"But we've managed to get through that, before helping Year 8 to get through."

But if it is so cool to talk about drugs and even to experiment with them, what can the older teenagers tell the younger kids to discourage them?

Simple, says Matt. "I say I would give them more respect if they said 'no'. It takes more guts to say no. And coming from a Year 10, that would be quite powerful for me if I was a Year 8."

It's an approach that has certainly impressed 13 year olds Jason Cox and Nicola Thirkill. The Canon Lee Year 8s were among a group who had just attended a mini-performance and presentation about drugs by a group of older Year 10 peer educators.

"They were telling you what drugs can do and what harm they can do," Jason said. "This boy was taking LSD and ended up in a car crash. It was very persuasive.

"It is kind of cool to talk about drugs, but I wouldn't ever want to try drugs now, no."

What was good about the presentation, Nicola added, was that the older pupils who gave it understood what it was like to be a teenager.

"When you talk to adults it feels like they are just nagging on to you," she said. "They have never done it, they are all perfect. But I thought this was really, really good. I never knew that 'e' would come in all different shapes and that. Now I've seen the effect of it and it doesn't really look very good. It has put me off."

Sue Foster, City of York Council's senior education and development adviser, admits it is difficult to measure just how much the peer education project has really been changing attitudes among younger teenagers.

"Bu the feedback I've had is very positive," she says.

The younger teenagers found it much easier to accept 'hard messages' from teenagers just a couple of years older, Sue said. "They have the same life experiences and so on."

That's why the city council and the Selby and York Primary Care Trust, which jointly run the project, hope to extend it next year.

At least three more York secondary schools should be taking part in the scheme.

In the week that follows the inquest into the tragic death of 20-year-old footballer Thomas Staniforth, who died after taking ecstasy, that has to be good news.If you like to believe your 13 year old isn't being exposed to drugs, chances are you are living in a dream world. Drugs are out there - and teenagers being teenagers, they are interested in them. Just like they're interested in anything that's forbidden. Matt Klar is a 15-year-old Year 10 pupil at York's Lowfield School. He's cool - and he hates drugs.