- Using the survey data and insights from research including Milkman’s, a new national plan was gradually introduced. It was called Youth in Iceland.
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 organisations 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.
A law was also passed prohibiting children aged between 13 and 16 from being outside after 10pm in winter and midnight in summer. It’s still in effect today.
Home and School, the national umbrella body for parental organisations, introduced agreements for parents to sign. The content varies depending on the age group, and individual organisations can decide what they want to include. For kids aged 13 and up, parents can pledge to follow all the recommendations, and also, for example, not to allow their kids to have unsupervised parties, not to buy alcohol for minors, and to keep an eye on the wellbeing of other children.
These agreements educate parents but also help to strengthen their authority in the home, argues Hrefna Sigurjónsdóttir, director of Home and School. “Then it becomes harder to use the oldest excuse in the book: ‘But everybody else can!’”
State funding was increased for organised sport, music, art, dance and other clubs, to give kids alternative ways to feel part of a group, and to feel good, rather than through using alcohol and drugs, and kids from low-income families received help to take part. In Reykjavik, for instance, where more than a third of the country’s population lives, a Leisure Card gives families 35,000 krona (£250) per year per child to pay for recreational activities.
Crucially, the surveys have continued. Each year, almost every child in Iceland completes one. This means up-to-date, reliable data is always available.
Yeah... this is awesome... but as the author points out, just a few of the reasons this won't happen any time soon in Trumperica: We're not usually fond of government oversight... I mean, In my limited experience... most parents don't like being told how to parent: yah... and then there's this: America doesn't seem to spend proactively. I mean, in Colorado, if your kid plays a sport? you pay. If your kid is in show choir? you pay. If your kid is in theater? you pay.... hell.... if your kid RIDES THE BUS? you pay. In the USA, we seem to fund education at higher and higher levels... but teachers pay stays stagnant, and every extra gets cut. Something is going on... and it's not pretty... I know this post wasn't about education funding, but when it comes to funding children, the future, etc., unfortunately... this feels too "progressive", forward-thinking, and proactive for the current American palette.Public wariness ... the heart of the balance of responsibility between states and citizens. “How much control do you want the government to have over what happens with your kids? Is this too much of the government meddling in how people live their lives?”
Links between parents and school were strengthened through parental organisations 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.
State funding was increased for organised sport, music, art, dance and other clubs, to give kids alternative ways to feel part of a group
Whoof. Where to start. Yes. Those are clearly the only two choices. Thus, the era that introduced paraquat into mexican marijuana (thereby creating the entire Humboldt County Superweed y'all grew up with) and eliminated quaaludes, singlehandedly creating the rise of crystal meth. This era of thinking also took the coke spoons advertised in the back of Playboy and replaced them with the "crack epidemic" and left us with the thoroughly practical "just say no" campaign. 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. It took this guy until 1992 to discover D.A.R.E.? Okay, this is a great place to take a side-step into demographics. Go look up Tindar, Iceland. I thought I would to see how big it is. Turns out, it doesn't exist. Which might be due to the fact that Icelandic is written in like runes and shit but might also be due to the fact that Iceland - all of it - has a smaller population than Tampa. Than Honolulu. Than Anaheim. According to Wolfram Alpha, half again as many people attended Woodstock as live in Iceland. About 30,000 of them are teenagers, also according to Wolfram Alpha. Demographically speaking, Iceland's teens are a negligible school district. Compare and contrast: Portugal is also heralded as a bastion of progressive drug treatment and their population is thirty times that of Iceland. Their approach, by the way, is "all the drugs, all the time." But getting back to the demographics: Sounds fucking stunning until you realize that you're talking about like 5,000 kids. That's two good high schools in LA. Pretty easy when they fit on a Wikipedia page. Drill down into some of those - most of them serve towns with a population under 1000. At that statistical bleeding edge, a town with 600 people of which 10% are between the ages of 10 and 20 has like 20 kids between the ages of 14 and 16. That means if Bjorn had a drink last week but Bjork didn't, you get a 5% variation. But do tell. What magic program accomplished all this wizardry? ...like in the USA since the '70s. Like the PTA and PTO in every school district in the United States going back to the '30s. Like every fucking PSA ever run on television in the United States since the invention of television. Like 70% of American cities. That's it. It's the pledge. Hey, let's look at those statistics again. Fuckin' geniuses. ...okay well that speaks to a stunning lack of availability for weed more than anything else. fuckin' A. It's almost as if trends in Iceland are a microcosm for trends worldwide... regardless of the spin they want to put on it. That's because countries on the scale of Iceland include Barbados, Belize and Martinique. Malta is 25% bigger than Iceland. I mean... yay. Let's keep kids off drugs. But "the rest of the world isn't listening" might be due to the fact that they aren't doing anything really different, and their sample size is so small that the whole damn country amounts to a tiny pilot project.Milkman’s doctoral dissertation concluded that people would choose either heroin or amphetamines depending on how they liked to deal with stress.
After this work was published, he was among a group of researchers drafted by the US 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?
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?”
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.
In 1992, 14-, 15- and 16-year-olds in every school in Iceland filled in a questionnaire with these kinds of questions. This process was then repeated in 1995 and 1997.
The results of these surveys were alarming. Nationally, almost 25 per cent were smoking every day, over 40 per cent had got drunk in the past month. But when the team drilled right down into the data, they could identify precisely which schools had the worst problems – and which had the least.
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 organisations 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.
A law was also passed prohibiting children aged between 13 and 16 from being outside after 10pm in winter and midnight in summer. It’s still in effect today.
For kids aged 13 and up, parents can pledge to follow all the recommendations, and also, for example, not to allow their kids to have unsupervised parties, not to buy alcohol for minors, and to keep an eye on the wellbeing of other children.
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.
No other country has made changes on the scale seen in Iceland.