Successful experiences deserve to be copied. A study carried out in 1997, with the support of FAPESP, at a secondary public school in São Paulo, showed that prevention can be effective in the reduction of drug use – even if the problem of drugs does not start and finish in the school, but passes through it. “In this project, we made the teachers address the subject of drugs not like doctors or agents of repression, but as agents important for spreading and multiplying information.
We empowered them to discuss the subject openly with their students “, recalls Arthur Guerra de Andrade, from the Interdisciplinary Group for the Studies of Alcohol and Drugs (GREA in the Portuguese Acronym), of the Institute of Psychiatry in USP's School of Medicine. “The subject matured within the school, and the pupils were able to identify clearly the three components of the problem: control and repression, which is a function of the police; treatment, which belongs to the area of medicine; and prevention, which is information and education.”
Guerra de Andrade is now returning to the topic, including it within an ample program for the prevention and treatment of drugs in USP, and directing it towards a younger public: the primary and secondary level pupils of the Application School of USP's School of Education, which attends basically the children of members of staff and teachers at the university. The idea is to apply the same methodology that was a success in the previous project in the new research project (which Andrade is coordinating). According to Daniela Pinotti, a psychologist with the GREA, it was necessary, first of all, to understand how the Application School works, which was achieved observing the classrooms and the kids at play, in addition to meetings with the team of directors and the teaching staff.
This served as a basis for the following steps: the application of questionnaires for all the pupils, teachers, staff and parents (now completed, with tabulation and statistical analysis under way); actions to publicize the project in the school (campaigns, distribution of posters, folders, leaflets, and weeks of debates, relating the subject of drugs with the personal and social way of life of the pupils).
The work is now focused on classroom activities. As Daniela explains, each teacher is given individual supervision, in order to take to their field meetings (humanities, biology, etc.) a contribution to the program. For example: a extra-curriculum book on drugs, as a suggestion for reading in Portuguese lessons; books with data on drug trafficking for activities in mathematics; lessons on the environment that relate to the human body (the personal environment), showing how each person can conserve it or destroy it, using everything from a healthy diet to the various kinds of drugs.
Because the destruction of the individual environment contributes towards the devastation of the social environment – the consumer of drugs feeds a chain of trafficking that also helps to produce a more unjust society. From this point on, the actions should be focused on the teachers' autonomy. They will be the ones to carry on the work of prevention, after the research project ends in 2004. Accordingly, the objective now is to slot the project into the school's pedagogical program, so that it becomes permanent.
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