Activities about volatile substance abuse

There are many things that you can do to help children and young people learn about the dangers of volatile substances. The publications section of this site gives details of several useful booklets, articles and education packs that will help you.

Here are a few ideas for activities that have been developed from ones in those publications -

Make a list of the precautions and the care that a family could take to reduce the risk of accident from the misuse of household products. You could do this as a competitive game – seeing who can get the most or the best ideas. It might be better to do it as a brainstorming exercise – one person has a piece of paper and a large felt-tip pen and ideas are written down as they are shouted out by the group.

Answers could include:

• keep all hazardous household products in locked cupboards (childproof locks are available for kitchen cupboards and bathroom cabinets often have keys)
• keep less hazardous products out of the reach of children (and remember that they can climb!)
• consider, where possible, using safer products (for example, use water-based felt tip pens and glue)
• use products (for example, dishwasher powder) that are sold with childproof lids
• train children to use products only for the purpose for which they were designed and to follow instructions
• teach children the reasons why precautions are taken with so many household products
• train older children to observe safety precautions (such as always returning potentially hazardous materials to locked cupboards after use)
• store inflammable products in cool places and avoid storing too large quantities
• always make sure that containers are clearly labelled and always replace lids after use
• never store a hazardous product in a container that has a safe label (e.g. do not keep petrol in an orange juice container)
• wipe up spills immediately.

(adapted from Ives R and Wyvill B 1993 Solvents, Drugs and Young People Folens)

Household products are safe provided that they are used for the purpose for which they were made and if the directions are carefully followed. However, the same products if used incorrectly may be hazardous. They can be:

• toxic - poisonous if consumed, or inhaled, or allowed to touch the skin
• inflammable - likely to catch alight
• caustic - burning the skin or eyes
• irritant - causing soreness to skin, nasal cavity (nose) or eyes
• asphyxiating - causing suffocation.

Print out this list of household products. Then cut out the boxes and arrange different items in groups according to their potential hazard or hazards. You can add other items to the list.

(adapted from Ives R and Wyvill B 1993 Solvents, Drugs and Young People Folens)

This is an exercise that would be suitable for KS2 or KS3 children. But it can be done outside school, of course. The purposes of this exercise are:

• to find out about the laws concerning the sale of volatile substances
• to find out how supermarkets and other shops prevent children and young people from obtaining volatile substances
• to think of more ideas for controlling the sale of volatile substances.

Visit your local supermarket and make a list sniffable products that you find on the shelves. Group your list according to the sections in which you find these products (for example: household cleaning materials, personal hygiene).

If you were a supermarket manager, how would you prevent children and young people from buying sniffable products to misuse them? Brainstorm your ideas. Remember that many of these products have legitimate uses, so children and young people who want to use them for their proper purpose should have be able to buy them.

Plan an interview with the manager of your local supermarket. Decide which questions you will ask him or her. For example, does the law allow him or her to sell sniffable products to children? Are there any other substances that the supermarket can sell to adults, but not to children and young people? How does he or she prevent children and young people from obtaining sniffable products from the supermarket? Then, if you can, interview the manager.

How easy do you think it would be for a sniffer to obtain sniffable products from this supermarket? Write down your reasons.

Plan and write a letter to the supermarket manager thanking him or her for the visit. Tell him or her what you thought about the supermarket's rules for preventing children from obtaining sniffable products. If you can, make some more suggestions to help the supermarket to stop children obtaining sniffable products.

This is a good exercise for Key Stage 3 pupils when they are exploring the role of the media in our lives. Looking at the way that the media reports drugs’ stories and trying to report them differently helps young people to understand the biases and misinformation that sometimes mar reporting. In trying to do their own reporting they will learn how difficult it is to write a clear and objective story of an event.

Collect some press-cuttings about drug and volatile substance misuse from a selection of newspapers and magazines. Make sure you have a variety and include a daily broadsheet and a daily tabloid national newspaper, a local newspaper, and some magazines aimed at different people (including women’s magazines, men’s magazines, teenage mags.) Look at the ways that drugs’ stories are reported. You might find that the same story is treated differently in different publications, for example, you might observe that some publications take a more sensationalist approach than others. Discuss these differences.

Then play this game. Divide the group into two (if there are only two of you, it will still work OK). One group takes the role of visitors from another planet, who have come to Earth in order to report to the readers of their alien youth magazine or youth TV programme on the things that Earthlings do. They have been investigating Earth Cultures for some time and want to do a special report on ‘Drugs that change the way people feel’. They are particularly interested, and find it hard to understand, how some young Earthlings risk their lives by sniffing everyday household products. The other half of the group takes the role of young Earthlings who know about sniffing and are willing to be interviewed by the aliens. But of course, they have their own viewpoints about the use of drugs and solvents and the alien reporters will have to try to understand different points of view. The reporters can then write up an article for one of their planet's youth magazines (or do a programme for a youth TV programme). The Earthlings can give comments on the results: do they feel that their opinions have been adequately represented.

An addition to this exercise would be then to reverse the roles, and ask the aliens to think about what the drug issues were on their planet, and then for them to be interviewed by the other group who now act as Earthling reporters.

A starting point for this exercise (or a follow-up) could be to use the UK Department of Health leaflet, ‘Drugs and Solvents: A Young Person’s Guide’ which has a cartoon of an alien who is trying to understand Earthling’s drug and alcohol use.