I've had this book lying around the house - it's only just been published in England. It's by Tom Scott and Trevor Grice and is called The Great Brain Robbery: What Everyone Should Know About Teenagers and Drugs. It has an illustration on the cover of a guy with a huge yellow brain in a wheelbarrow - he looks as though he is heading for the hills with it.
The book is fantastic. Both of the authors are from New Zealand. One is a cartoonist, journalist and documentary film-maker. The other is the director of the Life Education Trust and apparently "in constant demand as a drug counsellor", which comes as no surprise - they are a brilliant duo.
The book is shockingly informative, witty (wheelbarrow aside) and not at all patronising. I guess that must be the hardest thing to do with a book like this: to get the tone right. "People take mood-altering chemicals because they enjoy altering their moods. But ... for every high there is a low; for every trip, a return journey ... " There are also lots of case histories and personal testimony.
I picked it up with low expectations, just thinking I would try to educate myself better - my eldest son is a teenager and my three younger sons are getting there fast. I flinched my way through the chapter on alcohol (at least I was reading over a mug of weak Earl Grey ... although there is a caffeine chapter too) and as I read on, I was more and more impressed.
A quote from Henry Youngman pasted across the top of the alcohol chapter sums up the difficulty with drug education and underlines Scott and Grice's achievement: "When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading." We don't want to know the bad news about what we might be doing to our brains. We'd much rather stop reading.
My fifteen-year-old son was suspicious when saw the book on the kitchen sideboard - he wanted to know whether I had left it out in the hope that he would look at it. I said that I did want him to look at it, but also that I had been reading it avidly myself. To my surprise, he took it away. All he's said about it since is one word: "scary". He hasn't given it back. If you're a parent, then you probably know that you can't rely on a teenager reading a book like this - or even agreeing to glance at it - but that is no excuse for not trying.
