the Department of Youth Development, Sport and Recreation jointly sponsored a drug prevention workshop for three days last week.

And now the participants will make group presentations tonight at the Sports Department on how the information was received.

The workshop was part of the "Drugs Don't Play Here Initiative'' of the Bermuda Council on Drug Free Sport, designed to stamp out drug use in sports.

Also present were representatives from the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sports who discussed performance enhancing drugs, though the problems associated in sports locally are more in the area of social drugs.

"We are assisting the organisation to run a facilitators training course,'' said Calvin Ming, prevention officer of the National Drug Commission. He stressed the aim was not to identify drug users within sports and ban them.

"These are administrators of the national governing sports bodies who were training in order to deliver drug prevention programmes within their own sports bodies.

"Drug testing was discussed but that was not the focus of the course. The course was to give them information on presenting to young people some broader background as to the issues of drugs in Bermuda and some of the social change theories that are now occurring and how you deal with young people in delivering these types of prevention programmes.

"These are some of the topics that they should address before addressing the harm of drugs and how to get comfortable in dealing with young people about these issues.'' Tonight, after the group presentations, certificates will be handed out to the participants of the course.

"Just about every major sporting body in the Island, something like 22 to 24 sporting bodies, were represented,'' explained Ming.

"This is not the last. We will be running another two early next year.'' He explained that the intention was to have a workshop for the community clubs so that they could also get involved.'' Last week's seminar was held on Monday night, Friday night and all day Saturday and was, Ming estimated, equal to about 16 hours of training.

"We also had presenters from the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sports to help to talk about those banned substances, performance enhancing drugs,'' he added.

"We'll be doing a lot more of this in the future for those sporting governing bodies that wish to train on the club level.

"We need to talk with people like we had this weekend. I can say they are interested in approaching this issue in order to prevent these types of problems which can be far reaching Island-wide.

"The idea is not to ban them from the sport but to provide them with information so they can go and seek help.'' DRUGS DGS SPORTS SP