Mina Seinfeld de Carakushansky - President of BRAHA – Brazilian Humanitarians in Action

TO THINK GLOBALLY, ACT LOCALLY, RESPOND PERSONALLY!

Scientific studies in many countries show us that drug-use damage is not confined solely to drug users, it affects the whole community. Those studies also teach us that this massive damage increases or decreases according to something that seems obvious but is not: the growth or reduction of drug use. The extent and diffusion drug consumption has reached in our cities and worldwide increasingly seems a most critical factor of violence, corruption and family grievance. They are not many who believe the drug drama can be solved or is even on the way to solution. When a collective body and an individual do not believe themselves able to overcome a problem, they end up a subject of the problem. For the community and the individual, the problem is no longer just a problem, it has changed into a reality, the reality. They adapt, accommodate and surrender themselves.

However, not all lower their arms; a current visible minority will not surrender. I would not call them “optimistic”, because they like neither pitiful lies nor golden pills. As a matter of temper and intellectual belief, these people are convinced the drug drama can be solved. The solution will not rain down from the sky, it will depend on each city, because the fight towards victory has to be fought inch by inch. It will depend on the incentives and encouragements granted to citizens by each city’s institutions and social and political leaders. Only shared protagonism can draw us out of a situation the seriousness of which threatens the welfare of all citizens.

After years of continous studies and practical experiments in the prevention area, in my daily working with individuals and organizations from diverse countries, dealing with matters associated to drug prevention and treatment, I have acknowledged that the narrow notion is widespread about what drug use prevention is. Many working with prevention, confine it to the primary-prevention notion, believe preventing drug use means just talking, and school lecturing about drugs.

Others believe that our youngsters must only be taught how to make decisions, improve their self-esteem and acquire personal skills so as to positively face life’s difficulties. All such initiatives are tools for reaching the purpose of a healthy and prolific development of the human being leading a social life without traumas and drug-consumption desire, although they should not be considered as objectives by themselves. They are part of a whole that encompasses many other initiatives in such different performing areas as is the control of drug-supply.

Courage lacks to directly face a drug-using child and his/her quite diminished possibilities of reaching adult age as an able and skilled human being for a full life, requirements of a productive and harmonious performance within the social context. As government, as NGOs and as citizens we cannot remain silent. We must fold up our sleeves and act. We must leave the bubble, the ivory tower. But ours is the duty to be aware of what goes on in the world, to acknowledge the success and failure experiences of other countries in order to know which is the most proper way of conducting this prevention work.

Actions have been undertaken in many cities of the world addressing drug use prevention. It is up to governments, parents, neighbors, teachers, counselors, physicians and the majority of all able citizens to gather forces and join in order to defeat the epidemic scourge of drug consumption.

We have strength and strategy. Strength comes from the love for our beloved ones that are endangered, in emergency. Strategy is the fighting plan that arises from investigation and study, as well as from the synergy sprouting from our encounters. To brake, and even to push back the growth rates of drug consumption, is possible. This is not a sheer expression of desires, for, as evidences show, this is the result of continuous, intense and well concerted efforts.

I am convinced that true and massive prevention is one of the best ways to fight the drug problem. And preventing requires making society, and all and each human group forming it, aware. A shared protagonism is required. Family, school and community must work together to create strong patterns against all forms of mind-altering drug use and abuse. Our present and future action-strategies must focus on the early actions of primary prevention. Prevention programs are especially effective when they address pre-adolescents who have never experimented with drugs. Parents, schools, teachers and educators are the most adequate to help prevention because they are in direct and constant touch with children. And those must even seek to make that touch, beyond physical, this touch should be intellectual as well as spiritual. Both parents, and teachers and educators must try hard to be relevantly well informed and updated concerning the prevention strategies.

Educational measures added to the development and practices of social qualification are the best weapons for controlling drug abuse.

Each public policy must bear a thoughtful planning, provided with detailed follow-up procedures concerning the adopted methodology and the effected interventions. Mechanisms must be produced that enable the change of errors into process-improving tools. We face a great challenge that measures both the size of our integrity and the tenacity of our actions.

Constant interventions are required — individual and collective answers, short- and long-term strategies.

To build a single work front would be a short-sighted view. The risk would exist of unfruitfulness, because isolated efforts fade away.

Prevention must be done with clarification and information. Through such playful and cultural activities as drama, poetry, music. Prevention through sports in such events as popular chess tournaments. Through popular access web sites, through video making, through editing publicity material. Provision of medical, social and psychological care clinics, for conditions not so serious yet. Projects communicate among themselves to form an invisible but strong  net of help and support.

We human beings bear the imperative need to receive tenderness and attention. Children or adolescents that do not feel such human warmth at home hide themselves away into anything even remotely resembling warmth and attention.

According to some Internet-loving opinion-makers, we are quickly heading towards a society that will refuse intermediations. Future people will communicate with one another through Internet web sites. The widespread information would homogenize peoples’ knowledge level, as it used to happen in the agora, the public square where Greek men gathered for debating. But this future agora would be the size of the world.

We have been hearing statements on the speedy rhythm of the changing world, and on how pitiful those will be who fail to adapt to such speed.

As a counterweight for the consequence from the future world (which is actually already here), where we can be everywhere and talk to nearly everybody without leaving home, the idea comes strongly to the open that we should relate to several groups or institutions where we are allowed the possibility of keep living as individuals with recognizable features, specific friends, problems and interests that can be discussed face to face.

So, it is increasingly essential that we must so bind to several associations of people from our own environment as to be able to feel that we have a true name, not only a password; that our colloquist is bone and flesh; that we share past experiences and future plans, and, lastly, that we are an important part of an universe which belongs to us.

That is what we seek as members of a club, any association or group of people with common interests and ties. Cities like Rio de Janeiro, Brazil or Medellin, Colombia, with all sorts of problems, especially drugs, have been excelling examples of the relevance lately attributed to the possibility of active participation in numerous sports, social or cultural activities, which offers  the right to be heard and the certainty that the interests gathering their participants are more important than the differences or rivalries eventually separating them, and that achieving collectively reaches much further than individually. Cities like Volta Redonda and Nova Friburgo (in Brazil), Manta, Bahia de Carraquez, 24 de Mayo, Portoviejo in Ecuador, Queretaro, Los Cabos and San Juan del Rio in Mexico , Salto and La Pampa in Argentina, among many others have already given their initial steps as preventive cities. Individuals of integrity (yes, the common and not-so-common people) face the challenge of working increasingly better and the need and opportunity of changing various voices into an harmonious tune so that our cities become increasingly happier and pleasant and their inhabitants become safer, more productive and self-assured.

As an ending, I will give you a few examples of practical measures taken in my city, many of them introduced by me when I was the Special Secretary for Prevention of Chemical Dependence of the City of Rio de Janeiro: prevention everywhere, a preventive “sweeping broom”:

• In the 1,035 city public schools, in the City Secretariat of Social Development’s shelters, in the workplaces of several Secretariats, in social clubs.

• With parents and custodians of children and youngsters, with neighborhoods’ associations, with managers of apartment-buildings.

• Lectures, conference openings, participant in qualification courses in Brazil and abroad. Partnership with student associations and other youth groups.

• Engaging all city administrative boroughs and becoming engaged with them.

• Convening with corporations. Language Courses in Rio, for instance, grant 1,000 scholarships per year for outstanding pupils in drug prevention activities to study English or Spanish.

• Promoting relevant statutory law.

United we stand stronger and Preventive Cities seems to be one of the new and powerful tools for building strong networks and coalitions for a healthier, safer, more productive and happier world.