Reflecting on the Life Ed Bus: Did Harold Keep Us Off The Hard Stuff?

I remember the first time I entered the Life Education bus in Year 5. The huge mobile classroom sat looming on the concrete for days. 

I couldn’t wait to get inside and see what wonders it had to offer: The starry-night ceiling, fuzzy walls and tactile models of the human body. It was spectacular. Harold the Giraffe, appearing from behind a curtain and speaking to the cross-legged class, was (at that moment) the coolest thing I’d ever seen – despite being completely aware that the educator leaning up next to the window had slipped an arm into Harold’s soft, felt depths in order to operate him. 

It was mostly fun and games on the bus, prodding plastic lungs and chanting self-affirmations – until it came to discussing drug use. There were relentless warnings about the perils of melting an adolescent brain with Mary Jane. Videos featuring re-enactments of drug-induced psychosis. Anecdotes from people who had tried methamphetamine and subsequently spent years stealing their family's TVs and wallets to keep up their habit. We watched these in the dark. A choice that felt pertinent to the message: be afraid. 

My prominent takeaway from the Life Education substance-abuse lessons was that drugs ruined lives. Exposure to worst-case scenarios had me thinking that if I ever so much as sniffed glue I’d end up on the street, never to see my parents again. 

But then I tried drugs. And they were… good, actually.  

I didn’t die. I didn’t fail NCEA. I didn’t betray my loved ones by cashing in their affection for ice. From the time I first took MDMA on a cistern in a club toilet (very cool, very Skins) I’ve enjoyed plenty of dizzying nights on it, along with LSD, cocaine and ketamine – and these years of no-incident drug indulgences got me thinking: That long-necked, yellow bastard giraffe… lied.  

According to a 2022 Ministry of Health survey, 49 per cent of Aotearao’s adult population has used recreational drugs and, since Harold has been around for 30 years, plenty of those people will have sat in the Life Ed bus. 

So I’m not the only one who found their scare-tactic style failed to prevent drug use. 

Danny, a 23-year-old Wellington resident, told me she thought she’d die if she ever did drugs – but she’s now a regular cannabis user. 

“Because [Life Ed] went so hard on drugs and said all this stuff about them being so scary, even one time, when we finally tried them, it felt like we were lied to,” another 25-year-old friend from Auckland told me.

While Life Ed might’ve helped young people in other ways, its drug-use warnings may not have had the desired effect.

Life Education is independent of government funding, which it says keeps the org from being “restricted by government policy”.

I asked John O’Connell, from the Life Education Trust, about their current approach to substance use to see if their teaching had changed much, and whether my memories of what it had been like when I was a child were correct. He said the Healthy Harold approach has evolved over the years.  

“When teaching about the impact of substances, we cover the adolescent brain, how it develops and functions and how substances affect our behaviour and emotions,” he said via email.

“Cannabis is rarely something schools seek support with and if it is, the lessons would likely also focus on peer pressure, anxiety, or stress management strategies.”

The Life Education website puts a great emphasis on inspiring positive choices through holistic means, which perhaps means some of the scare tactics have been put to bed. 

But for myself and many peers – now in our late 20s – years of fearing that drugs would ruin our lives had the unintentional effect of granting us permission to go berserk when they didn’t. 

By trying to do the right thing, programmes like Life Education may have steered us down a different path. 

A whopping 86 per cent of New Zealand schools use the Healthy Harold program, according to The Life Education Trust, but when it comes to preventing drug and alcohol use there’s little statistical proof that any such programs are hugely successful.  An independent review of government-funded drug and alcohol programs, commissioned by The Ministry of Education, stated that this lack of evidence around their success was “because there have been limited opportunities to carry out comprehensive evaluations of most of the programmes used in New Zealand.” 

Life Education’s own online resources declare that 95 per cent of teachers agreed “the educator created and delivered lessons that met the needs of children in my class” and 96 per cent of teachers agreed or strongly agreed that “Life Education provides children with useful skills in the future”. But information about the students themselves is lacking. 

Life Education cites “significant improvements” were reported in the Youth2000 series, which is Aotearoa’s longest-running study of rangatahi. The Trust’s website points to “decreased substance use,” keeping in mind that this refers to alcohol and cigarette use, too, but no specific statistics on drug use are included. 

Youth2000’s 2019 study did show a decrease in binge drinking and cigarette smoking. Teenage cannabis use has decreased a small amount, too, with 6.5 per cent of rangatahi reporting weekly cannabis use in 2001 and 4.1 per cent ticking the box in 2019 – which O’Connell said is proportionally “a significant drop” of 36 per cent. But there’s been no substantial change since 2012. The vague category of “other drug use” hasn’t increased, but it hasn’t declined, either. On paper, the change is slow at best. 

I wanted to get more specific about the influence of Life Education, and young people’s drug use (keeping it separate from darts and drinking), so I decided to run my own little study. I am a scientist now. 

Using the highly professional and scientifically acclaimed polling tool on Instagram, I surveyed 100 New Zealanders aged between 15 and 30 and asked them about their current drug usage. Here’s what they had to say: 

5% never tried drugs. 

10% don’t use drugs currently. 

37% use drugs occasionally (1-2 times a year.) 

48% frequently use drugs (once or more a month.) 

Depending on which group you find yourself in (“Oh my god, people do drugs that much” vs “Oh my god, there are people that have never done drugs”) the results might come as a shock. 

The question “Did Life Ed training prevent you from doing drugs as an adult,” received six per cent yeses and 94 per cent nos. 

To the question, “Have your experiences with drug use matched Life Ed training.” 91 per cent of the 67 respondents said no. One respondent, now a full-time nurse, expanded on the final question and said drugs were “more fun” than Life Education made them sound. 

Victoria, 27, said “I feel like the age at which they came to see us was almost too young for drugs. I was scared shitless at 12 about drugs and alcohol. But, further down the line, it’s a distant memory.” 

While exhilarating and well-intentioned, the short-lived trips to the bus might not have been enough to make the messages stick. 

Sarah Helm, Executive Director of the New Zealand Drug Foundation, emphasised that the New Zealand guidance on alcohol and other drug education for schools is that “one-off events such as expos and presentations that focus on delivering information are not effective.” 

And on top of how we teach, there’s what we teach. 

The New Zealand Drug Foundation explored the results of the Youth2000 survey and said “many effective preventative approaches aren’t directly related to substance use at all, such as helping young people feel like they belong [or] that they can achieve”. 

Life Education clearly understands this indirect preventative approach  – the program looks holistically at children's identity, stability and mental health in its teaching.  

But the studies fail to acknowledge perhaps the key reason most people take drugs: they’re fun. 

It’s already well-reported that making drugs sound terrifying doesn’t work. 

Regarding youth drug education, Helm said teaching had to replicate real-life experiences, not over-exaggerate, or the presentation can end up “being more entertainment than education”.

One survey respondent, Guy, explained that when his friends began experimenting with drugs in their teens they “became more inclined to experiment further with [drugs] than we would’ve”. And he puts it down to the stark differences between the taught expectations and reality.

For a lot of people, drug experiences are positive, or at least not bad enough to put us off. 

If a singular drug experience is meant to lock us into penniless, toothless, loveless lives, but we instead find it relaxing, thrilling or eye-opening, that positive experience can make us more disposed to not believe some of the important lessons we’re taught as kids. 

Sure, watching Harold get a reach-around for a couple of days might be giddying, but a more well-rounded and nuanced approach could create a safer, healthier environment for young people to experiment with drugs.

Rachel Barker is a writer / producer at VICE NZ in Aotearoa. You can find her @rachellydiab on IG and Letterboxd and see her film criticism on Youtube.