Drug Abuse Prevention for Youth Project

Zdjęcie nagłówkowe otwierające podstronę: Drug Abuse Prevention for Youth Project

PHOTO: Panorama of Istanbul

The University of Opole implements a project of Erasmus+ Strategic Partnerships for Youth programme together with Harran University (Turkey), University of Oslo (Norway), University of Istanbul (Turkey), and Associação Juvenil de Deão (an NGO from Porto) in the area of cannabis use prevention.

The project has been ongoing since February 2020, but due to the epidemic situation the UO managed to sign the agreement and join the consortium in August. Thus far, the project has produced a prevention course for young Turks, and an educational film addressed to them by Tunca Topcuoglu, who is a Turkish artist working in Amsterdam, .

The project work is carried out on the basis of data from researchers from Opole and Oslo, who use the data from their research projects. The project involves two sociologists from the UO: Dr Magdalena Piejko-Płonka and Dr Michał Wanke, who use the data from their three projects carried out as part of grants from the National Bureau for Drug Prevention in 2015-2019.

At the same time, scientific work is underway: the project group was invited by Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy journal to guest edit its special edition on cannabis users' cultures and cultural aspects of marijuana production and markets. A team of editors: Dr Hakan Gülerce, Dr Ruken Macit, Dr Sveinung Sandberg and Dr Michal Wanke will be waiting for abstracts until 22 March 2021 and for full texts until 25 June 2021 (for more details, please contact us at: https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issues/cannabis-cultures-cannabis-markets-global-perspective/).

- We assumed as early as at the stage of writing the application that, apart from educational work for Turkish youth, we need to achieve scientific outcomes, - says project coordinator Dr Michał Wanke. - We had a similar strategy when creating Intercultural Communication studies, which was appreciated last year by The Polish Accreditation Committee (PKA), highly evaluating the idea 'from teaching to science'. The special edition of the flagship journal dedicated to the subject of drugs makes researchers from the best universities around the world respond to the call for papers. In fact, my main task now is to encourage researchers from outside the United States, Australia or Canada to submit articles. We want to achieve a truly global overview of the rapidly changing world of cannabis. We also invite colleagues from the UO to submit abstracts, especially as our team offers help before the article is properly submitted to the system.

The project will last until the end of 2021, and the special issue of 'Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy" will be published in 2022, but the submitted articles will be published online as soon as the editorial cycle has been completed.

The Opole-based researchers were invited to join the project by Dr Ruken Macit, who was a student of the UO at the Institute of Sociology in 2015 within the Erasmus+ programme.

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