Psychologist Dominie Dale, our guest speaker last week, seized our attention with a graph illustrating the alarming rates of Icelandic teenage use of alcohol, cannabis and tobacco which in 1998 were by far the worst in Europe.
Something had to change and the government embarked on a comprehensive program based on "behavioural addiction" and the orchestration of a social movement around natural highs: around people getting high on their own brain chemistry.
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 per cent in 1998 to 5 per cent in 2016. The percentage who have ever used cannabis is down from 17 per cent to 7 per cent. Those smoking cigarettes every day fell from 23 per cent to just 3 per cent.
Dominie went on to talk of the remarkable success the Melbourne based Oxygen Youth Health organisation and and the program she initiated in Wallan last year.
Unfortunately, technical difficulties with the audio - visual system interrupted her presentation but the message shone through and President Bruce invited Dominie to submit a proposal for assistance by our club in a future local Youth Health program.
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