Drug awareness campaign empowers trainees

Representatives of the Say NO to Drugs campaign in the Eastern Cape recently empowered trainees at the Volkswagen B-Plant in Kariega during their Wellness Education Day.

The interactive session provided the young professionals with factual, practical, and eye-opening knowledge about drugs, why they are harmful, and how they impact individuals, families, and communities.

The initiative aimed to arm trainees with tools to make informed choices and to counter the devastating rise of substance abuse in the province. According to a Say NO to Drugs spokesperson, Sabelo Bless, the campaign is part of the Foundation for a Drug-Free World, one of the largest non-governmental drug prevention initiatives globally.

“The Foundation operates in over 180 countries and has reached more than one billion people with drug education materials.”

He added that the Say NO to Drugs campaign operates under the Foundation for a Drug-Free World, a global volunteer-based movement established in 2006.

“The campaign is designed so that anyone from teachers, community activists, law enforcement officers to concerned citizens, can start their own group, with all materials freely provided by the Foundation,” Bless said.

“In the Eastern Cape, our headquarters officially opened on 6 April this year, though globally the programme has been active for nearly two decades. In Africa alone, over the past year we have educated and reached more than 1.2 million people in 32 countries. Within South Africa, approximately 149,000 people have been reached in the past year through seminars, meetings, and awareness drives including here in Gqeberha,” he said.

“The campaign is supported internationally by the Church of Scientology in the same way that many religions and community bodies support humanitarian programmes. However, the campaign itself is secular and focuses exclusively on drug prevention education.”

According to Bless, the engagement comes at a time when the Eastern Cape, and South Africa at large, is facing an unprecedented surge of drug-related problems, most notably the accessibility of crack cocaine. Once thought unlikely to penetrate this region, the drug has spread rapidly, wreaking havoc on youth and families.

“Clearly, someone took the opportunity to explore virgin territory at the painful expense of the youth and parents who have to watch as their children get torn apart by this drug,” the campaign noted. The result has been devastating, with many young people seen homeless, incoherent, and trapped in irrational behaviour.

During the session, trainees reflected on how stigma perpetuates addiction. One trainee remarked, “You know, the problem is not that we don’t know that drugs are bad for you; it is the fact that when one tries to quit, they are ridiculed by society, which pushes the person back to the unwanted state he was in. This comes from those people in our communities not knowing what we are learning today…”

This reflection was sparked by the Say NO to Drugs booklets, which provide clear, fact-based insights into the real effects of drugs.

Bless concluded that this initiative highlighted how drug use has been dangerously normalised, to the point where sobriety can appear unusual.

“Tackling that mindset with hard facts was the cornerstone of the campaign’s intervention. All we do is provide the facts and see to it that they are understood.”