How Iceland Got Teens to Say No to Drugs – The Icelandic Model
I become excited and inspired when I see concepts, ideas and methods that I use in my work validated by international scientists and authors. The two articles that I have included excerpts, both offer alternative ideas around the use and abuse of alcohol, tobacco and drugs. From my experience, combining these two perspectives is the core of my work with supporting and facilitating shifting patterns, behaviors, obsessions and addictions.
I typically integrate these three principles/methods for shifting unwanted patterns and behaviors.
- Exercises supporting the discovery and understanding of our patterns and thinking.
- Explore what we feel connected to, or the lack of connection, to people, animals, friends, family and our environment. Create a plan to improve and expand our connections. (Read Johann Hari’s views on addiction and connection at bottom of this post.).
- Brainstorm interests, passions and activities that we have either enjoyed in our past, present or would like to explore, including creative expressions, physical activity, opportunities to connect with the natural world, or anything that inspires or stimulate us. We follow the brainstorming process by implementing some of these interests and activities into our life before or during launching into facilitating the shift in the unwanted behaviors. In short, let’s find out what will inspire and stimulate you to replace the patterns, behaviors and addictions that are problematic. (This parallels the process Harvey Milkman researched in the U.S. and implemented in Iceland, discussed in the main article focusing on teens and addiction.)
The article focuses primarily on the work with teenagers smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol and using other drugs. The principles are applicable to adults as well as teens. My experience personally and professionally demonstrate that the primary reason most people can’t sustain behavioral changes in their life are due to not creating a plan of protective and supportive choices and behaviors to replace those that we are wanting to shift.
If just deciding to stop and change unwanted behaviors was a successful and sustainable process, everybody would have done it already!
How Iceland Got Teens to Say No to Drugs
Curfews, sports, and understanding kids’ brain chemistry have all helped dramatically curb substance abuse in the country.
It’s a little before 3 p.m. on a sunny Friday afternoon and Laugardalur Park, near central Reykjavik, looks practically deserted. There’s an occasional adult with a stroller, but the park’s surrounded by apartment blocks and houses, and school’s out—so where are all the kids?Walking with me are Gudberg Jónsson, a local psychologist, and Harvey Milkman, an American psychology professor who teaches for part of the year at Reykjavik University. Twenty years ago, says Gudberg, Icelandic teens were among the heaviest-drinking youths in Europe. “You couldn’t walk the streets in downtown Reykjavik on a Friday night because it felt unsafe,” adds Milkman. “There were hordes of teenagers getting in-your-face drunk.”
We approach a large building. “And here we have the indoor skating,” says Gudberg.
A couple of minutes ago, we passed two halls dedicated to badminton and ping pong. Here in the park, there’s also an athletics track, a geothermally heated swimming pool and—at last—some visible kids, excitedly playing football on an artificial pitch.
Young people aren’t hanging out in the park right now, Gudberg explains, because they’re in after-school classes in these facilities, or in clubs for music, dance, or art. Or they might be on outings with their parents.
Today, Iceland tops the European table for the cleanest-living teens. The percentage of 15- and 16-year-olds who had been drunk in the previous month plummeted from 42 percent in 1998 to 5 percent in 2016. The percentage who have ever used cannabis is down from 17 percent to 7 percent. Those smoking cigarettes every day fell from 23 percent to just 3 percent.
The way the country has achieved this turnaround has been both radical and evidence-based, but it has relied a lot on what might be termed enforced common sense. “This is the most remarkably intense and profound study of stress in the lives of teenagers that I have ever seen,” says Milkman. “I’m just so impressed by how well it is working.”
If it was adopted in other countries, Milkman argues, the Icelandic model could benefit the general psychological and physical wellbeing of millions of kids, not to mention the coffers of healthcare agencies and broader society. It’s a big if.
“I was in the eye of the storm of the drug revolution,” Milkman explains over tea in his apartment in Reykjavik. In the early 1970s, when he was doing an internship at the Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital in New York City, “LSD was already in, and a lot of people were smoking marijuana. And there was a lot of interest in why people took certain drugs.”
Milkman’s doctoral dissertation concluded that people would choose either heroin or amphetamines depending on how they liked to deal with stress. Heroin users wanted to numb themselves; amphetamine users wanted to actively confront it. After this work was published, he was among a group of researchers drafted by the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse to answer questions such as: why do people start using drugs? Why do they continue? When do they reach a threshold to abuse? When do they stop? And when do they relapse?
“Any college kid could say: Why do they start? Well, there’s availability, they’re risk-takers, alienation, maybe some depression,” he says. “But why do they continue? So I got to the question about the threshold for abuse and the lights went on—that’s when I had my version of the ‘aha’ experience: they could be on the threshold for abuse before they even took the drug, because it was their style of coping that they were abusing.”
At Metropolitan State College of Denver, Milkman was instrumental in developing the idea that people were getting addicted to changes in brain chemistry. Kids who were “active confronters” were after a rush—they’d get it by stealing hubcaps and radios and later cars, or through stimulant drugs. Alcohol also alters brain chemistry, of course. It’s a sedative but it sedates the brain’s control first, which can remove inhibitions and, in limited doses, reduce anxiety.
“People can get addicted to drink, cars, money, sex, calories, cocaine—whatever,” says Milkman. “The idea of behavioral addiction became our trademark.”
This idea spawned another: “Why not orchestrate a social movement around natural highs: around people getting high on their own brain chemistry—because it seems obvious to me that people want to change their consciousness—without the deleterious effects of drugs?”
By 1992, his team in Denver had won a $1.2 million government grant to form Project Self-Discovery, which offered teenagers natural-high alternatives to drugs and crime. They got referrals from teachers, school nurses and counsellors, taking in kids from the age of 14 who didn’t see themselves as needing treatment but who had problems with drugs or petty crime.
“We didn’t say to them, you’re coming in for treatment. We said, we’ll teach you anything you want to learn: music, dance, hip hop, art, martial arts.” The idea was that these different classes could provide a variety of alterations in the kids’ brain chemistry, and give them what they needed to cope better with life: some might crave an experience that could help reduce anxiety, others may be after a rush.
At the same time, the recruits got life-skills training, which focused on improving their thoughts about themselves and their lives, and the way they interacted with other people. “The main principle was that drug education doesn’t work because nobody pays attention to it. What is needed are the life skills to act on that information,” Milkman says. Kids were told it was a three-month program. Some stayed five years.
In 1991, Milkman was invited to Iceland to talk about this work, his findings and ideas. He became a consultant to the first residential drug treatment centre for adolescents in Iceland, in a town called Tindar. “It was designed around the idea of giving kids better things to do,” he explains. It was here that he met Gudberg, who was then a psychology undergraduate and a volunteer at Tindar. They have been close friends ever since.
Milkman started coming regularly to Iceland and giving talks. These talks, and Tindar, attracted the attention of a young researcher at the University of Iceland, called Inga Dóra Sigfúsdóttir. She wondered: what if you could use healthy alternatives to drugs and alcohol as part of a program not to treat kids with problems, but to stop kids drinking or taking drugs in the first place?
Laws were changed. It became illegal to buy tobacco under the age of 18 and alcohol under the age of 20, and tobacco and alcohol advertising was banned. Links between parents and school were strengthened through parental organizations which by law had to be established in every school, along with school councils with parent representatives.
Parents were encouraged to attend talks on the importance of spending a quantity of time with their children rather than occasional “quality time”, on talking to their kids about their lives, on knowing who their kids were friends with, and on keeping their children home in the evenings.
This is an excerpt. To view the entire article in The Atlantic please continue here.
Emma Young is a writer based in Sydney, Australia. Her work has appeared in New Scientist, The Guardian, and Sydney Morning Herald. She is the author of Sane.
Johann Hari, ‘The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety – it’s connection’
When you write a book, it’s like writing a message in a bottle and tossing it into the ocean – you know the likelihood is that nobody will ever find it, and it’s hard to picture the people who might. I’ve known plenty of people who spent years writing important books, only for virtually nobody to ever read them. So I was conscious, all through the three-and-a-half years I was writing Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, that I was most likely writing primarily for myself and for the people I love.
I was OK with that, because I was impelled on this writing journey for a very personal reason – a series of questions I needed to answer. One of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to. I didn’t understand why then, but as I got older, I realised we had addiction in my family. As I began writing, I knew we were coming up to a century since the world first went to war against drug users, addicts and providers, and I wanted to know – why? What really causes drug use and drug addiction? What are the alternatives in practice? There was one person I love in particular who was close to killing himself with crack and heroin. I needed to know if the addicts I loved could be brought back to me, and how.
In search of answers, I ended up going on a 30,000-mile journey, to a dozen countries. I don’t want to get all Oprah on you, but one of the main things I realized is that the best journeys in life aren’t where you find yourself – they’re where you find other people.
A few weeks ago, I told an audience in Colombia that the world owed them an apology – for inflicting this war on them. A young woman stood up, and said nobody had ever said that to them before. They had always been made to feel the opposite – that they owed the world an apology. She looked startled. Shame, I realised at that moment, is spread everywhere in this global war except in the direction where it’s deserved – the people who have been imposing this war on the world for the past 101 years, even though the evidence has been clear for a long time that it’s not the best way.
As I write this, a lot of the memories of the past year are a bit of an adrenaline blur, but I think there are a few moments that I’ll always remember. They are tied together by one of the central themes of Chasing the Scream: connection. I was taught by the people I met – and by the growing scientific evidence – that we are all more vulnerable to addiction now because we are increasingly isolated from each other, and from the things that give us meaning.
As I say in the book, the opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety; it is connection.
To view the full article in The Guardian, please continue.
I am curious and interested in hearing your experience of reading about the work of Harvey Milkman, Gudberg Jónsson and Johann Hari? What felt like a glimpse into a path forward for you? What created discomfort in your mind and body? Are you ready to shift the patterns and behaviors that feel like they don’t belong to you any longer?
Another method and ideology that is incorporated in my work was formulated by Martin Brokenleg. He integrates the Circle of Courage, a system many Native American/First Nations foundation is based on. A small except of the concepts are included in this post – Look At Me: Why Attention-Seeking Is The Defining Need Of Our Times.
Other posts you may enjoy:
It’s Never Too Late To Be Amazing
Sex Makes You Beautiful and Healthier
Spiritual Change: Tie Your Shoes Different
What Is Gray Area Drinking and What Can I do About it?
Michael Swerdloff
Providence Holistic Counselor, Coach and Reiki
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