What does a Not Even Once session actually look like?

“Turn on your devices!”

It’s probably not the directive that high school students are used to hearing as they file into their school hall and take a seat for a 90-minute seminar. Over the hum of conversation and chairs scraping against the floor, Teen Challenge director Tanya Cavanagh instructs the group to download the Kahoot app, if they don’t have it already, and set up a profile. She is friendly, energetic and clear-spoken, her purple hair and warm smile the first impression.

It’s a Friday morning and Tanya has the help of three additional presenters with their L-plates up. Ifeoma, Stan and Lisa have been training to be able to do what Tanya does so well.

“When you hear the word ‘drugs’, what comes to mind?” is the first question fielded to the 70 students seated in rows. They answer anonymously via the app and their answers flash on the screen: bad, illegal, weed, medicine, my dad.

Tanya warms up the group with some more simple questions, introducing the topic of drug use in a matter-of-fact way.

“Some of this is going to be hard to hear, it could be triggering,” she says. “We’re not here to say you’re a bad person. We’re here to help.”

There’s the usual mix of personalities; the studious, the clowns, the talkers, the withdrawn. And there is the recognition that a diverse range of backgrounds (and exposure to drug use) is represented in the room.

“What kind of character quality would you like to be recognised as having?”

Again, students respond via the app and their responses are shown on the screen: honesty, kindness, funny, cool, Mickey Mouse. There’s always one!

A rapport and warmth is developing, massaged in the exchange between Tanya and the students as they answer the questions, as she laughs at some of their responses or gently addresses them.

And then we dive deep, into the broad and compelling evidence of how drug use affects the developing brain. We look at comparative brain scans of a healthy brain, and the brain of a marijuana user. On the screen, a neurologist explains to a teenager that his brain looks like a 70-year-old’s, all because of drug use. The difference is clear to the eye: misshapen, shrunken, with minimal brain activity.

The audience is becoming more responsive. And quieter. They are drinking it in. They now know that female brain development stops at approximately 25-years, males at about 32, and how incredibly important those years are for their future plans. That vaping isn’t as harmless as the manufacturers and retailers would like them to think, and indeed that people have been dying from vape use. That brain damage from drug use has been likened to dementia, the sad memory decline of people usually aged in their 70s and 80s.

“We’re seeing it in people in their teens,” Tanya says.

She relays a conversation she had with a 16-year-old who repeatedly forgot information that had just been shared with him. Exactly the way an elderly person with dementia would.

“This was after just seven months of drug use.”

The information shared at this NEO seminar, and many others, has the potential to save lives. Looking across the room of 70 students brimming with potential, considering how each can individually contribute to the wider community, it is sobering to think just how integral the message is. This is a room full of our future. And it’s encouraging to know that these NEO seminars in schools can be the very thing ensuring that the hopes and dreams of young people are not thwarted by drug use.