The lack of/need for a supportive infrastructure was cited by many respondents and highlights once again that public education cannot exist in a vacuum. The use of drugs by both consumer and health professionals is powerfully influenced by such issues as sources of drug availability and financing, prescribing behaviour, promotion, legislation and priorities in drug policy. It has been argued that in an unsupportive infrastructure public education may be a waste of time. This view seems unnecessarily defeatist and in the broader sense there are examples of consumer campaigns successfully contributing to infrastructural changes (such as legislation) that open the way to a more supportive environment for other public education activities. Perhaps the potential constraints represented by an unsupportive infrastructure underscore the critical necessity for programme planners to understand and investigate the presence of such constraints during the activity planning process. This highlights again the fact that educational activities do not take place in a vacuum but within a context in which people’s beliefs, practices and structural constraints have to be understood and taken into account.