XN000022-1996-05-23 — Page 13

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On preventive education we will be setting up a Task Group involving voluntary agencies, teachers, social workers and young people to review and improve our preventive education strategy. We will organise, as Helen Yu said, an International Conference on Drugs Education for schools. This will involve 300 local educators, voluntary agencies and experts from Pacific-rim countries, and it will discuss ways of improving drugs education in schools.

We will be organising education camps for students and youth to disseminate anti-drug messages. We will be organising anti-drug roving exhibitions in all districts in collaboration with District Fight Crime Committees. We will be advertising anti- drug messages on students' common-stored value tickets with the sponsorship of the MTRC. We will be organising a major publicity campaign in 1996-97 to promote an anti-drug culture among young people, using extensive media advertisements, posters, leaflets and souvenirs.

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On treatment and rehabilitation where we had I think some outstanding contributions which left me with a feeling, I must say, of greater hope - on treatment and rehabilitation the Social Welfare Department will set up a second team of specially trained social workers in October this year to help young people who have been experimenting with drugs. We will be organising workshops and seminars to strengthen training for health care professionals involved in the treatment and rehabilitation of drug-abusers. We will be deploying 15 additional social workers to strengthen the counselling service at methadone clinics.

Finally, on research, we will be conducting a survey in 1996-97 on drug-abuse among secondary school students, and another study will be undertaken over the next year to identify the risk factors leading to drug-abuse among the young, and the protective factors which can help prevent the onset and continuance of drug abuse.

These are just some of the items in our Forward Action Plan. So you can see that we have another busy year ahead. We very much hope that these actions and measures, coupled with follow up action on the other proposals coming from our discussion today, will give further impetus to our campaign. And I would like to remind you that if there is anything that you wanted to say this afternoon but were not able to say or felt a bit shy about saying, please write it down and put it in the box which is available, or after this meeting write to me or to Peter or the Commissioner, and we promise we will include your ideas in the review which ACAN will conduct.

Let me finally make this point once again. I called the first of these summits a year ago because like many of you, in a community which has by and large been spared some of the ills which have wrecked urban life elsewhere, and in a community where by and large which is not to be complacent - but by and large the crime figures are incomparably better than in comparable cities in other countries and continents, despite those good things, I was concerned and you were concerned about one line on the graph paper which continued to head north, one line which continued to go up, the line on drug-abuse, the figures for drug-abuse, the figures for drug-abuse particularly by the young.