“They’re doing it anyway, let’s have a conversation about it”: exploring student and stakeholder attitudes towards drug education programmes for university students

Abstract

Purpose

Drug (including alcohol) use among UK university students is estimated to be widespread and associated with adverse social, physical, and mental health consequences. Drug Education Programmes (DEPs) may reduce drug-related harm although there is a sparsity of literature exploring their use in higher education settings; a gap our research aimed to fill.

Materials and Methods

We conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with 20 university students and four individuals involved in the development and/or implementation of university drug education services. Interviews explored students’ experiences of drug use and the perceived barriers and facilitators for implementing university DEPs.

Results

Using reflexive thematic analysis, we developed the following five themes: (1) A culture of drug use; (2) Balancing risk and reward; (3) Drug use as a coping mechanism; (4) The current approach is failing students; and (5) A new approach.

Conclusions

While DEPs are a promising way of reducing harm, students’ fears of judgment, punishment, and criminalization may prevent them from fully engaging with them. Successful implementation of DEPs would therefore require structural changes to encourage students to access any future interventions.

Keywords:

• Drugs education
• harm reduction
• university
• qualitative
• student

Ethical approval

Ethical approval was obtained from the xxx Research Ethics Committee (approval code: 140421117134).

Author contributions

LW: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Writing – original draft and Writing – review and editing. VRC: Conceptualization, Supervision, Writing – review and editing. OMM: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Methodology, Supervision, Writing – review and editing.

Consent form

All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000 (5). Informed consent was obtained from all patients for being included in the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Anonymised transcripts for student interviews only (given their content, stakeholder interviews cannot be meaningfully anonymised) are available from the University of Bristol’s Research Data Repository (DOI available upon acceptance).

Notes

1 MDMA is sometimes termed ‘the love drug’ due to its association with feelings of love, warmth and social connectivity (Lyubomirsky, 2022).

Additional information

Funding

This research received no external funding and was supported by a personal budget awarded to Olivia M. Maynard by the School of Psychological Science at the University of Bristol.