Parents Urged to Utilise NCDA Services

Director of Information and Research at the National Council on Drug Abuse, Ellen Campbell-Grizzle, is imploring parents to utilise the counselling services and wealth of information offered by the organisation, to assist in effectively monitoring their children’s whereabouts and actions.
Mrs. Campbell-Grizzle revealed that increasingly, the agency has been receiving questions from parents, who are worried that their children may be abusing dangerous substances.
“We are getting a lot of questions about prescription medicines and there are a lot of questions from parents who want to know if their child is abusing drugs,” she informed, adding, “sometimes parents don’t know what kind of questions to ask without sounding or being accusatorial of their children and the NCDA can assist in helping them to overcome these challenges.”
She said that parents can become very good advisors, particularly as it regards preventing the abuse of dangerous substances, if they are equipped with the necessary information to steer their children in the right direction. Such information, she said, includes the effects of the abuse of both legal and illegal drugs. Drug abuse, the NCDA Information and Research Director pointed out, is not limited to illegal drugs, but extends to other substances, including prescription drugs.
Emphasising that information is “really good medicine”, Mrs. Campbell-Griffith stated, “the information that the NCDA imparts to parents empowers them with the skills to explore some of these issues that are bothering their children”.
Many people, she informed admit that had they known of the negative and addictive strength of some of these substances when they first started using them, they would not have commenced the process.
Mrs. Campbell-Grizzle urged parents to maximise use of the NCDA Library and Information Centre, which carries books on health communication, parenting responses and behaviour change, among others, as well as exhibits of a number of these substances and the paraphernalia used to administer the drug to the body. “You name it, we have it” she said.
“We recommend that parents who want to increase their knowledge of drug abuse, come in and see the exhibits inside the information exhibition area, to see what the drugs that are causing so much trouble in our country look like. We are willing and able to provide that service to them,” she stated.