Children as young as eight are pretending to be drug lords in the school playground, a policing boss has warned as he calls for earlier intervention.
The Independent previously reported how research showed “alarming evidence” of primary school children being targeted by county lines gangs who traffic drugs from urban to rural areas.
And now young pupils are said to be normalising talk of drugs and acting out drug behaviours at breaktime instead of playing traditional make-believe games such as “Cowboys and Indians”.
David Sidwick, Conservative police and crime commissioner for Dorset, told reporters: “I have primary school headteachers who have eight year olds acting out drug behaviours, behaving like drug lords in the playground.
“The way it was expressed to me was the kids were acting out as though it’s normal to be a drug lord, it was normal to talk about the drugs… When I was a kid it was ‘Cowboys and Indians’.”
Mr Sidwick, who has a background in the pharmaceutical industry, suggested there needed to be a generational shift with children taught about the dangers of drugs at a younger age.
“In the same way we need to get ahead of things like misogyny and hate crime, we’ve got to get ahead of drugs,” he said.
“We always hear about work in the teenage area, quite rightly, but we need to get ahead of it and do it earlier.
“You have to get younger with what we are talking about.”
He highlighted the need for more emphasis on tackling illegal gateway drugs such as cannabis, ketamine and MDMA, which can often be a young person’s first experience with banned substances.
When asked how a prospective new public health or educational campaign would be more effective at getting the message across to young people than previous examples such as the Just Say No campaign, Mr Sidwick claimed there were “quite a lot of things there now which is different to what we had years ago”.
He suggested the key to getting through to a generation of youngsters who smoke and drink far less than those before them was to emphasise the risks of drugs such as cannabis to their health and the way they look.
Speaking specifically about class B drug cannabis, he said: “Now we are able to look at population studies, we see there’s a much greater link of the causality of cancer, with the causality of birth defects – I’ve seen one quote which said the last time there was a state sanctioned drug like this it was called thalidomide.
“And also the fact there’s some work emerging showing it accelerates ageing. That’s really interesting, because if that’s true, that’s a good message to take to our young people.
“People have greyer hair, there’s evidence your teeth start falling out earlier. But fundamentally in those places where they’ve legalised it you can see a difference there in causality for things like testicular cancer and breast cancer than in places where you don’t.”
He added: “It’s got to be about the risks. It’s got to be about the fact there’s people wandering around with ketamine for example who don’t have bladders anymore.”
According to research by the Children’s Society in 2019, children as young as seven are being exploited by brutal “county lines” drug dealers in the UK.
Police previously found children as young as 10 linked to the 2,000 drug-dealing county lines estimated to be operating in the UK, but the report found younger victims may be overlooked because they are below the age of criminal responsibility.
The youngsters are forced or coerced into moving drugs across the country and work in cannabis factories, shoplift, pickpocket or act as enforcers, according to the report, as they are exploited with promises of money, drugs, status and affection.
