In the past year, at least one stu­dent of Pre­sen­ta­tion Col­lege, San Fer­nan­do was ar­rest­ed and charged for pos­ses­sion of drugs.

This in­ci­dent has giv­en a group of 40 young, im­pres­sion­able stu­dents the im­pe­tus to pre­vent any more of their peers from falling prey to drugs and pro­tect the pres­ti­gious im­age of their col­lege as well.

For the Roy­al Bank of Cana­da (RBC) Young Lead­ers 2013 pro­gramme, Pre­sen­ta­tion Col­lege, San Fer­nan­do, has em­barked on an an­ti-drug cam­paign.

Stu­dents from Form Three and up­wards, have all band­ed to­geth­er to bring about aware­ness of the dan­gers of drugs. As a re­sult, they have em­barked on sev­er­al projects, which in­clude some graph­ic posters as well as hand bands with the very evoca­tive but sim­ple slo­gan, "Don't let your life go up in smoke."

Posters have al­ready gone up around key places in San Fer­nan­do, in­clud­ing out­side Pre­sen­ta­tion Col­lege on Carib Street, to dri­ve the mes­sage home. The hand bands will al­so be made avail­able.

The young­sters have al­so em­barked on an am­bi­tious 25-minute film project, writ­ten by stu­dent Shane Charles, as they em­brace this year's theme, "Be the Change."

Head of the mar­ket­ing team, Fifth Form stu­dent Ste­fan Cor­bie, ex­plained their choice of an an­ti-drug cam­paign as a medi­um to at­tract the at­ten­tion of their peers by us­ing vi­su­al aids and the so­cial me­dia to get their mes­sage across.

"We chose the idea of drug aware­ness, due to is­sues at the school, with re­gards to the abuse of drugs which is be­com­ing more preva­lent among young peo­ple. Specif­i­cal­ly, mar­i­jua­na, cig­a­rettes and al­co­hol," Cor­bie said.

Di­rect­ed by Denith Mc­Ni­colls, the on­ly past stu­dent in­volved in the team which is led by teacher David Samai, the mov­ing dra­ma tells of an av­er­age stu­dent's bat­tle with drugs.

The film, which will be post­ed on YouTube, leaves room for the imag­i­na­tion of its view­ers.

Charles said they chose the so­cial me­dia in a bid to con­tin­ue to ed­u­cate as many view­ers as they can about the dan­ger and mis­use of drugs, long af­ter the com­pe­ti­tion has end­ed. The film was pre­miered at the school on April 11.

The RBC Young Lead­ers pro­gramme is a com­pe­ti­tion de­vel­oped by RBC to help young peo­ple de­vel­op lead­er­ship skills and team­work and strength­en the so­cial, moral and eco­nom­ic well-be­ing of so­ci­ety. The pro­gramme hopes to achieve this by chal­leng­ing stu­dents from var­i­ous sec­ondary schools across the coun­try to un­der­take com­mu­ni­ty de­vel­op­ment projects in their re­spec­tive ar­eas.

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