Secondary school messages more nuanced
Balancing messages is harder for older children. It's as unproductive to discourage people from taking drugs if they're not considering doing it as it is to preach abstinence to people who are already experimenting with alcohol, tobacco and drugs.
The ACMD report Pathways to Problems observed that, where drugs education appeared to have the perverse effect of increasing drug use, this happened ‘most notably in the classroom, where both drug users and non-users are taught together.’
Presumably, a badly judged message delivered to a whole class may have the simultaneous effect of irritating users into defying it while piquing non-users’ curiosity.