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drinkanddrugsnews
| July 2012
Health protection |
Drug awareness
www.drinkanddrugsnews.com
Evolving out of the Global Drug
Survey, Drugs Meter is a tool that
allows people to get non-judgemental
feedback on their drug use.
Adam Winstock explains
F
or the last decade or so, with the help of some great colleagues, I
have managed to get lots of people to answer questions about their
drug use by collaborating with media organisations like Mixmag and,
more recently, the Guardian. However, while I got to write papers and
participants got to read the results, I felt that the Global Drug Survey
(GDS) could provide an even more beneficial service. This led me to develop the
Drugs Meter, an anonymous way for anyone to gauge their drug use, which, I hope
will encourage people to make positive health choices in a non-judgemental way.
For most people, for most of the time, use of substances is primarily a
source of pleasure and does not incur serious harm to themselves or others.
Many people are able to self-regulate their use – they dabble for a while and
stop – and others who run into problems are able to change the way they use.
But some people don't recognise when their drug use is causing themselves or
others harm. Some people who take lots of drugs look at their friends and
think everyone does the same.
I spend my working day as a consultant addiction psychiatrist in London with
people who use heroin and crack, alongside other drugs and alcohol. People who
are dependent on drugs and/or are in treatment represent the minority of people
who use, or have used, drugs or alcohol, and almost all started using drugs in a
way that did not cause them serious harm. The journey to problematic drug use
may have taken several years, but no one is interested in people who use drugs
before they develop serious problems or are causing a nuisance to society.
There is no guidance for people who use most drugs about what constitutes
safer levels of drug use. This is because most governments take the stance
that all drug use is bad and the only way to avoid drug-related harm is to not
use drugs at all. Although many governments embrace the concept of harm
reduction, most is aimed at the minority of people who use heroin or inject. The
hidden masses of drug users – those 2-3m people who won’t ever see a drug
service – are likely to be left behind.
*****
Getting people to change their behaviours is hard. The last three decades have
seen a growth in individual psychological approaches to encourage behaviour
change, with motivational interviewing and brief interventions being the most
widely evidenced. While these have been applied to the full range of unhealthy
behaviours, they typically require face-to-face contact with health professionals
and disclosure by the individual.
More recently, the theories of behavioural economics and social normative
feedback have been explored to help craft simple large-scale approaches to
motivating behavioural change – such approaches aim to ‘nudge’ people’s
behaviours towards healthier and happier choices. The principle is simple. If you
find out that something you are doing (that you thought was normal) is in fact way
out of line with the behaviour of your peers, you tend to adjust that behaviour so
you become more like everyone else – which is how Drugs Meter works.
So are people interested in how their use of drugs and alcohol compares to
others? As part of the 2011 Global Drug Survey (GDS), we asked participants
this question. About 70 per cent said they were, while another 20 per cent said
maybe. We asked more than 12,000 people how they thought their use of
drugs and alcohol compared to other people who had used that drug recently,
and the findings were amazing. However, we need to explain that for
comparison we used other people who had filled in the GDS. That might not be
a fair comparison group but, given it was people from across the world, mostly
in their 20s or 30s and with enough of an interest to fill in a survey about drug
use, we don’t think it’s a bad comparison group.
It’s