XN000022-1996-05-23 — Page 5

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Governor: I think as Peter said, the fact that the work of the Narcotics Division comes under Security doesn't mean that the only aspect of the problem we look at is law enforcement. I think that we spend probably when we talk about these matters more time talking about rehabilitation and treatment, more time talking about preventive education. But obviously the law enforcement side is very important too. One of the things we really do have to stop particularly in this part of the world so close to the golden triangle, one of the things we do have to stop is the transit of drugs through Hong Kong and the trafficking of drugs in Hong Kong because we're obviously much closer to sources than some other international cities. But you're right to say that one of the things that were stressed again and again was the importance of the positive side of a sensible healthy anti-drugs campaign, the importance of the youth and community services, the importance of youth groups, the importance of life style education, the importance of all those things to help give people a positive image of themselves and to help ensure that people don't have idle time or idle minds which might encourage them to abuse themselves in the way that concerns us so much. So I accept that one of the important messages was that it's that side of things which has to have as much attention and focus and priority as possible.

Question: (on new young drug abusers)

Governor: I think it's true in every community that what concerns people most is that even in a more affluent age, even when we're extending educational opportunities more than ever before that the number of young people who experiment with drugs, sometimes fatally, continues to be alarming. At least we can point to one year now when the figures even for young abusers have come down. But it's still worrying that so many of those who are recorded as abusers are young people. So that's why we've got to give increasing attention to preventive education. That's why the LEAP programme which one of the speakers talked about today is so important, starting, and I've seen it myself, starting in primary schools trying at that stage to teach young people to be concerned about their body, to have a good self image, to have proper self esteem and to have a proper regard for how best to develop their full potential. I think it will be a long time before we're able to be at all content about the progress that we're making in these fields, but we've started and the really important thing while I accept that you don't want quick one-off campaign and then forget about it, the important thing is to try to mobilise the community's conscience, mobilise the community's concern so that this remains a really top priority. Because when you look at other cities where there're problems got out of control, that's not a fate that we want for Hong Kong. One of the things I said last year was that unlike a lot of cities in Europe and North America we don't, thank heavens, have a big youth unemployment problem. In Europe and North America very often they've associated drug abuse among the young with youth unemployment. Here we are with pretty good employment opportunities for young people, but we still have the beginnings of a drug problem. So that should give us cause for considerable concem and cause for continuing to act as vigorously as we possibly can.