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Getting Wise to Drugs

Reviewed by Martin Hills.

As a practitioner of drugs education in both formal and informal settings for over 5 years, I was very interested in this book.

Getting Wise to Drugs is a very well put together resource for anyone engaged in drugs education to the primary school age group. The exercises have been well thought through and put together and the language used is appropriate to the age group. It has been very nicely laid out making it easy to use and attractive.

There is nothing ‘groundbreaking’ in this book and there is nothing aimed to shock and disturb the reader. That is not the point of this resource.

What you get is a clear set of exercises to help you work with young people to open up the issues around drug use and associated risks. The book is split into five main sections.

Sections 1-4 look at risks associated to drug use for specific age groups 8-9, 9-10, 10-11 and 11-12 year olds, and each section offers a number of different activities for that age group. Each activity has been designed to last 30-45 minutes and makes them ideal to be used in a classroom environment. The activities are also appropriate for school curriculum.

Section 5 gives useful websites and names of organisations who are able to give advice and support on the issues raised through the exercises.

I think this is a great resource for youth and children’s workers and school teachers. Even parents could use elements of the material to open up dialogue with their children about risky behaviour and drug use.

The book is quite expensive at