A new government-funded project to tackle teen drug-taking is going to be trialled, and involves recruiting the most popular children in Year 9 as “anti-drug influencers”. We’re not joking.
The Frank Friends scheme will run across 48 schools in South Wales and the West of England from September, with 5,600 13- to 14-year-olds taking part. “Peer supporters” – voted as being in the most influential 17.5% of students – will have a two-day training programme, then a 10-week period of discussing the potential harms of drug use with the other kids.
While clearly well-intentioned, this seems like the daftest idea in the world, if you ask me. It’s the kind of thing someone only thinks up if: (a) they’ve never met a teenager; (b) they have a very simplistic view of how power dynamics within the complex social world of secondary school work; or (c) they are baked out of their skulls.
Lots of elements of being a teenager in 2019 are different to how they were 20 years ago, but a few core aspects are always going to be the same – so let’s take a point-by-point look at why the Frank Friends scheme is raising a lot of questions.
Being an anti-drug influencer is the least cool thing imaginable.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you shouldn’t take drugs. We all know that. But standing up in front of the rest of your school, at 14 years old, and saying: “Hey guys, I’m really cool, and I don’t take drugs, so you should also not take drugs if you want to be cool like me” is the worst thing conceivable. They will become bitter, sad adults 20 years later, looking back at that point saying: “This is where my life turned into an absolute toilet”. Nobody likes a grass.
Codifying popularity doesn’t feel great for anyone.
Do we really want to tell children, deep in the hormone-addled, insecurity-ridden throes of adolescence, that they are objectively less liked than their peers? The notion of stating one child in a class is the most popular is going to have some emotional fallout. It’ll crush some, while rendering others drunk (but, crucially, not high) with power.
The election process seems very hackable.
What seems more likely: a class deciding to put extra work, extra responsibility and a severely uncool title on a kid they all like, or them deciding to foist it all on an unpopular kid that they pick on? It’s hard to think of anything more humiliating – at a time of life where high school feels like the whole world – than being spitefully placed in a position like this.
It’s a lot of responsibility.
It’s rare a week goes by without a scary story about how overworked and stressed teenagers are, so add: “Yeah, you’ve got to stop kids taking drugs now”, on top of that, and some children are going to be crushed. It’s even been suggested that teens are taking increasing amounts of drugs as a way for them to cope with the stress of massive workloads, so throwing something like this in to eat into their time could surely make everything worse.
It isn’t out of the question that the popular kids are popular because they have drugs.
Stranger things have happened.
It sounds pretty abusable.
“Thanks for talking to me about your weed, Craig. Shall I look after it for you, tee hee hee?” Yeah, there’s no way that could go wrong.
Look, good luck to everyone involved in this – it might turn out to be really great – but to me, it sounds at best misguided. Young people are always going to be more likely to listen to their peers than their parents – and drug use is a problem that has to be tackled – but tying it into a popularity contest and placing the onus of responsibility on kids isn’t the way to do it.