He talked about the dangers of drug use, especially multi-drug use among youths. About 32% of cocaine addicts are under 25 years old.

Risk factors related to drug use and addiction:
– Dysfunctional homes and the lack of integration in society can be up to 30 times higher than homes that have better family ties.
– Availability of drugs: it is easy to access substances and at a low cost.
– Physical and psychological violence and social exclusion within the school environment: among those pupils, consumption of drugs and alcohol increased sharply compared to other pupils.
– Sexuality: 10% of the school population had already had their first experience when they were 14, and 70% had already had sexual relations without protection and under the influence of alcohol.
– 25% of pupils confessed that they had needed treatment because of drug consumption.

Strategies: Since young people seem to be more affected than others, they need special attention. Each country and each reality remains special to themselves and strategies will need to be adapted to the social, economic and cultural situations. Prevention needs to be adapted to the national policies that are currently implemented, and part of the national health policy.

Education:
– Need to put on the school curricula universal prevention, and be transversal.
– Selective and localised prevention: work with vulnerable and high-risk groups that may have already begun to use drugs.
– There was some resistance in schools: some teachers tended to stigmatise these students who were using drugs.
Treatment and rehabilitation:
– Absence of targeted programmes for adolescents who already consume drugs, and have to go to centres for adults. We are still in the phase of setting up these facilities.

Experience and lessons learned:
– At the preventive level, we need to guide young people in the form of a number of activities: theatre, story tellers, and other forms of training outside the school curriculum.
– We have developed activities for marginalised populations through local governments.
– We must develop skills and capacity to work with families.
– Prevention should not depend solely on the Ministry, it needs to start with the municipalities, the communities and the families.
– Need for early forms of guidance through communication aimed at young people: twitter, facebook.
– Need to generate information in an ongoing way and measure the effectiveness of the interventions.