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The Narcotics Division of the Security Bureau, the Action Committee Against Narcotics (ACAN), Commercial Radio 2 and Skyhigh Creative Partners are jointly organising a series of activities during the summer holiday to steer youths away from drugs.
The activities are part of the "Be Smart Be Free No Drugs No Nightmare" publicity campaign.
After the launch of the anti-drug open-top bus parade, the follow-up activity is a lyrics writing contest. Contestants are provided with a list of popular songs and are required to rewrite the lyrics with anti-drug content. Their work will then be adapted to produce new anti-drug songs and performed by the original pop singers.
After two weeks of recruitment, about 60 young people met tonight (August 10) at Skyhigh Creative Partners for their first lyrics workshop. They will attend another five sessions in the next two weeks. Professional lyricists will teach them the skills in writing lyrics.
To give more anti-drug knowledge to the participants, Chairman of ACAN Sub-committee on Preventive Education and Publicity, Ms Scarlett Pong was invited to tonight's workshop to explain the harm of drugs.
"Today's activity provides a good opportunity for our energetic and creative youngsters to show their talents and potentials to the full. Taking ketamine will hurt your body and is addictive. It is not worthwhile to take drugs to gain peers' recognition," she said.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Hong Kong – Enlighten Centre arranged a rehabilitating drug abuser to share his experience to let the participants understand more about how drug abusers think and to provide inspiration for writing anti-drug lyrics.
After completing training, they will be assigned the songs for which to compose lyrics.
Audience members who are good at imitating the voices and vocal styles of assigned well-known pop singers are being recruited to perform the songs with the rewritten anti-drug content. The enrolment deadline is August 20. The simulated versions performed by the participants will be mixed with the original version performed by the pop singers in game segments on Commercial Radio 2. Awards will be given to members of the audience who can distinguish the original version from the simulated one.
Those who want to find out more details of the summer youth anti-drug activities may visit the website (www.my903.com/my903/Narcotics2009/index.jsp).
Ends/Monday, August 10, 2009
Issued at HKT 21:23
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