Teachers have role in fighting drugs

The express-yourself-instantly wing of young people in Malta has reached serious proportions in the past years.

The number of known heroin addicts appears to be increasing now by 40-50 per cent annually. The pattern of heroin addiction has changed dramatically in recent years. Cases in which the source of addiction was therapeutic used to outnumber non-therapeutic addicts. In 1970 addicts under the age of 35 were rare. Now they account for more than half the total cases. Adolescent addicts were virtually unknown yet in the year 2000 there were over 400 known addicts aged under 20.

Now even children and adolescents still at school have been found taking drugs. Among informed observations that have been made on this problem, it has been noted that adolescent drug taking is culturally determined behaviour occurring usually at week-ends. The factors predisposing to addiction are complex and are largely unknown. Drug-taking is a contagious and mortal disease and the scale of the present outbreak in Malta indicates a grave social disorder.

It is an emergency calling for an efficient drive to contain the outbreak and the energies of many teachers will need to be directed towards the poor addicts many of whom are scarcely on the threshold of life.

When examinations are over, weekly seminars to encourage teachers to be informed about a hundred and one issues are organised in all schools. I suggest and appeal that a portion of this will be spared in many schools to ensure that their staff can recognise evidence of drug-taking in a boy or girl so that appropriate action may not be delayed. They can follow signs which should arouse suspicion such as absences, particularly on Mondays, by a previously regular attendee; loss of interest by a normally co-operative pupil; uncharacteristic elation or depression; and of course the finding of drugs or such visible evidence as puncture marks on the skin of the forearms.

A one-day seminar may be a reflection of a growing anxiety oppressing all teachers concerned with the welfare of young people. It will help them to know that drugs have lately become mores easily available.