Family reconnection, not punishment, is at the heart of UNICEF’s newly emphasised four-year strategy to pull Fiji’s youth away from drugs, the agency’s Pacific chief of child protection says, as fresh concerns emerge over needle-sharing and a growing link between drug use and HIV/AIDS.
In an exclusive interview, Michael Copland said UNICEF’s programme has been shaped by a recurring message from young people themselves: most want to return to safe family lives. “The children that we have been spending time with, the majority of them want to get back to a family,” Copland said, revealing that “just almost 80 per cent of them” expressed a desire to reconnect with family, despite having been through severe hardships. That insight, he said, is driving UNICEF’s focus on creating child‑friendly services and safe pathways home rather than purely punitive or after‑the‑fact responses.
The agency also flagged the scale and nature of the problem: around 3,500 school students may be involved in drug-related activities, Copland said, and worrying new behaviours are emerging. Authorities have reported an alarming practice known as “Bluetoothing,” in which amphetamines are consumed via transferred blood, and there are documented cases of shared needles. Those practices, Copland warned, are contributing to “a dangerous link with a surge in HIV AIDS cases,” compounding the public‑health emergency.
UNICEF says stigma and a pervasive lack of information are preventing open community conversation and timely intervention. “If we just ignore things, they’re not going to go away,” Copland said. He argued that prevention must be prioritised over reactive measures: “If we want to reduce the level of harm, just responding to the symptoms is a bit like just having the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. We’re waiting for people to fall off the cliff. Prevention is much more cost‑effective,” he told reporters.
The latest emphasis on prevention complements a broader UNICEF‑led initiative announced earlier this month that has attracted international support. Japan has committed funding to a four‑year programme to bolster prevention, early intervention and safer environments for children and adolescents; that wider initiative aims to reach tens of thousands of students and strengthen services for high‑risk youth. UNICEF’s current framing places family reconnection and community education at the centre of that work.
To implement the prevention approach, UNICEF is partnering with the Fijian government, religious organisations and civil society to run community‑level drug education and to expand access to child‑friendly counselling and rehabilitation services. The goal is to create environments where children in trouble can seek help without fear of stigma or criminalisation, return to school and, where appropriate, be safely reunited with family.
Copland said he remained cautiously optimistic that a “collective effort” could change the trajectory. By the end of the four years, UNICEF hopes Fiji will see fewer children falling into drug harm, more youth accessing supportive services, and stronger family and community systems to prevent relapse. The new information on needle sharing and the expressed desire of most affected children to reconnect with families reshapes the immediate priorities for authorities and partners as they roll out the programme.
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