The issue of drugs is one of the more difficult matters that national youth policy makers are faced with. Despite various attempts at controlling the supply of drugs and despite measures to reduce the demand for drugs by young people, the abuse of drugs has continued to grow.

Young people, by definition, are in transition. This transition process, while generally characterised as a movement from the dependence of childhood to the independence and responsibility of adulthood, actually involves change across the full experience of physical, social, economic and political life.

Conventional approaches to working with young people who use drugs in a harmful or hazardous way or who are dependent upon drugs are based on the principle that complete abstinence is the only acceptable goal: if a young person is injecting heroin, they should ‘kick the habit’; a youth experiencing problems with alcohol should stop drinking; and the young mother at home, on sedatives, should stop taking the pills. The only desirable outcome is considered to be a complete halt to the usage of the substance in question.

If the initial focus is to be on the person most directly involved, the individual drug user, we need, then, to be able to identify what programmes can be put in place to minimise the harm an addict does to him or herself through hazardous drug use. Here we focus on alcohol and illicit drugs.

The family provides the very foundation of life in most societies. Whether in its nuclear version or the extended concept it is an integral part of all communities. Ideally, the family should be a close-knit and supportive unit.

The use of drugs, licit and illicit, poses a threat to the wider community. Inevitably, most programmes that work with individual drug users will have an effect on that wider community, though often that effect is indirect.

A person under the influence of any drug in the workplace, particularly if they are in control of machinery, represents a very real physical threat to: themselves; colleagues; clients; and bystanders.

The person that works with alcoholics and/or drug users operates under major stress. Burn-out is rampant for workers in this area, and it is the drug worker who often seems to be the last person whose needs are considered. At times the worker takes on the role of ‘God’ and tries to solve the drug users problems, to fix the users life.

Young people are using and abusing drugs. Reality dictates that we must assume that this situation is not going to change in the foreseeable future. As unpalatable as this situation is, it has to be recognised and addressed.