A new model for substance awareness. The Drugs Wheel was devel­oped in tandem with UK Drugwatch, an informal association of charities, organ­is­ations and indiv­iduals who share an interest in estab­lishing a robust early warning system in the UK for all types of drugs.

The Drugs Wheel can be used as a training tool and as a game for use in training or 1:1 sess­ions. There are free ver­sions of each to download on this site, as well as a range of other resources. When using the Drugs Wheel, please bear in mind the following:

The inner and outer rings of the Wheel allow for drugs to be split into further sec­tions: they can be adap­ted for use in your own country or organ­is­ation, for exam­ple they could refer to pres­cribed or non-pres­cribed drugs, or levels of risk.

The issue of prescription drugs is also a topic of discussion when using the Wheel; how these drugs can have rec­rea­tional uses and how their legal status changes depending on whether they have been prescribed for the person taking them.

The Drugs Wheel is a model and as such doesn't aim to list every drug on the market, or pinpoint every compound's effect. Its goal is to simplify the drugs landscape, and as psycho­active drugs affect different people in different ways, some drugs fit into a number of categories. The synthetic cathinones for example can have both stimulant and empathogenic effects that we might associate with altered levels of dopamine and serotonin levels respec­tively (among other neuro­transmitters). The main area of overlap in the Drugs Wheel is that of stim­ulants and empath­ogens, however the empath­ogen cat­egory was included because there are drugs available (such as MDAI) that impact on sero­tonin levels without any noticeable stimulant effects in humans.

There are no 'hard copies' of the Drugs Wheel