poledriver
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Jul 21, 2005
- Messages
- 11,543
Pill testing won’t save people. Common sense will
By - Louise Roberts https://twitter.com/whatlouthinks
Do you want your kids to take illegal drugs? No.
Is there a safe way to swallow, smoke and inject these substances? Hello, that’s also a no.
Maintaining that message is a Parenting 101, you would think. One of those obvious things such as don’t give your kids matches, knives or loaded guns to play with.
But that inconvenient truth is trampled in our stampede to reach the apparent nirvana of inclusion and harm minimisation.
As sure as night follows day, news of a drug-related death at a weekend music festival has reignited calls for pill testing because pill testing “saves lives”.
Plus we have to swallow the lecture: young people will take drugs so let’s move on from the hard stuff such as education and penalties.
In this most recent case, 26-year-old Jake Monahan had a fatal heart attack after taking an unknown substance during an event at Mt Lindesay on the NSW-Queensland border. Two others also overdosed on party drugs and were flown to the Gold Coast University Hospital in critical conditions.
One reveller was witnessed screeching and clawing at the ground as the illegal synthetics took hold. It was one horror scene after another because people voluntarily opened their mouths and shoved the chemicals right in there.
Police are still trying to establish precisely what they took. So the theory rears again: if this dead risk taker had his substance tested and it told him it was a “bad dose”, he would not have taken it.
He would still be alive today. Really? Where’s the proof of that then? It’s a fairy floss safety net.
And who believes that an individual intent on getting high at a festival would have taken the time to test his drug before he indulged?
Surely the best message is: illegal drugs kill. But it’s part of our confounding era where parents don’t want to say no to their children for fear of alienating them or fracturing their psyches.
Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation’s Dr Alex Wodak told journalists that we as a society “should have the courage to test things” because pill testing is a harm-reduction measure in the same vein as a seatbelt.
“This is yet another battle between abstinence and pragmatism,” Dr Wodak said.
While I admire Dr Wodak for his efforts in drug and alcohol research, I cannot see how any responsible parent is happy to swallow the fashionable, elitist mantra that kids are going to take drugs no matter what, so let’s just make it safe for them.
It is the needle stuck on the record with the next chorus singing: “Hey you, the war on drugs is futile don’t you know?”
Well, doctor, I don’t want to teach my children how to take “safe” illegal drugs because, no matter the purity, they are never safe to take. Why is that so hard to accept?
There are no stats on the number of promising young men and women who have been snatched from the jaws of death because they rejected a dodgy ecstasy tablet.
But the real stats cannot be ignored. Illegal drugs costs the Australian economy an estimated $8.2 billion bill every year through crime, productivity losses and healthcare costs, not to mention family destruction.
According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, drug use moved from being the 10th top ranking risk factor for disease and injury in Australia to the ninth.
And we have a roll call of victims: Georgina Bartter, 19, Sylvia Choi, 25, Tolga Toksoz, 19, James Munro, 23, Nigel Paulijevic, 26, Stefan Woodward, 19, and of course 15-year-old Anna Wood who died in 1995, three days after taking an “eccy” at a dance party.
That is what killed her — the MDMA — so a purity test would have been futile.
Her father Tony Wood says: “They keep on about harm reduction. They say just take the stuff safely. But there is no safe way. You just don’t know what will happen when you take drugs.”
The NSW government has dismissed calls for pill testing with deputy premier Troy Grant saying: “What you’re proposing there is a government regime that is asking for taxpayer’s money to support a drug dealer’s business enterprise.”
And there’s no doubt test kits are a minefield. Can you see a young person going to their dealer and saying: “Hold on a sec, do you have a sample I can test?”
And the dealer saying: “Sure, take your time” before giving them a sample they know is “OK”.
The teen, satisfied, buys the drug — which could still kill him. That is the nature of drug taking.
By delegating to a test kit, we are dodging the hard stuff, the effort required to keep dialogue open with kids and use real-time opportunities to drive home an anti-drugs message.
Show them Whitney Houston. Show them George Michael. Two talents cut down thanks to drug abuse.
What happens if a kit says a substance is OK but it isn’t and a person overdoses or dies?
Does the kit manufacturer take responsibility? You can bet grieving parents will be out to blame anyone they can rather than accepting that it was their child who put a pill in their mouth.
And that’s what this all boils down to. Taking responsibility for yourself.
There are far more valuable things we should put time and effort into rather than helping people “safely” break the law.
Twitter @whatlouthinks
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/rende...l/news-story/f090e692508e4d3a671503ade59830a6
^ With many comments after the article.
By - Louise Roberts https://twitter.com/whatlouthinks
Do you want your kids to take illegal drugs? No.
Is there a safe way to swallow, smoke and inject these substances? Hello, that’s also a no.
Maintaining that message is a Parenting 101, you would think. One of those obvious things such as don’t give your kids matches, knives or loaded guns to play with.
But that inconvenient truth is trampled in our stampede to reach the apparent nirvana of inclusion and harm minimisation.
As sure as night follows day, news of a drug-related death at a weekend music festival has reignited calls for pill testing because pill testing “saves lives”.
Plus we have to swallow the lecture: young people will take drugs so let’s move on from the hard stuff such as education and penalties.
In this most recent case, 26-year-old Jake Monahan had a fatal heart attack after taking an unknown substance during an event at Mt Lindesay on the NSW-Queensland border. Two others also overdosed on party drugs and were flown to the Gold Coast University Hospital in critical conditions.
One reveller was witnessed screeching and clawing at the ground as the illegal synthetics took hold. It was one horror scene after another because people voluntarily opened their mouths and shoved the chemicals right in there.
Police are still trying to establish precisely what they took. So the theory rears again: if this dead risk taker had his substance tested and it told him it was a “bad dose”, he would not have taken it.
He would still be alive today. Really? Where’s the proof of that then? It’s a fairy floss safety net.
And who believes that an individual intent on getting high at a festival would have taken the time to test his drug before he indulged?
Surely the best message is: illegal drugs kill. But it’s part of our confounding era where parents don’t want to say no to their children for fear of alienating them or fracturing their psyches.
Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation’s Dr Alex Wodak told journalists that we as a society “should have the courage to test things” because pill testing is a harm-reduction measure in the same vein as a seatbelt.
“This is yet another battle between abstinence and pragmatism,” Dr Wodak said.
While I admire Dr Wodak for his efforts in drug and alcohol research, I cannot see how any responsible parent is happy to swallow the fashionable, elitist mantra that kids are going to take drugs no matter what, so let’s just make it safe for them.
It is the needle stuck on the record with the next chorus singing: “Hey you, the war on drugs is futile don’t you know?”
Well, doctor, I don’t want to teach my children how to take “safe” illegal drugs because, no matter the purity, they are never safe to take. Why is that so hard to accept?
There are no stats on the number of promising young men and women who have been snatched from the jaws of death because they rejected a dodgy ecstasy tablet.
But the real stats cannot be ignored. Illegal drugs costs the Australian economy an estimated $8.2 billion bill every year through crime, productivity losses and healthcare costs, not to mention family destruction.
According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, drug use moved from being the 10th top ranking risk factor for disease and injury in Australia to the ninth.
And we have a roll call of victims: Georgina Bartter, 19, Sylvia Choi, 25, Tolga Toksoz, 19, James Munro, 23, Nigel Paulijevic, 26, Stefan Woodward, 19, and of course 15-year-old Anna Wood who died in 1995, three days after taking an “eccy” at a dance party.
That is what killed her — the MDMA — so a purity test would have been futile.
Her father Tony Wood says: “They keep on about harm reduction. They say just take the stuff safely. But there is no safe way. You just don’t know what will happen when you take drugs.”
The NSW government has dismissed calls for pill testing with deputy premier Troy Grant saying: “What you’re proposing there is a government regime that is asking for taxpayer’s money to support a drug dealer’s business enterprise.”
And there’s no doubt test kits are a minefield. Can you see a young person going to their dealer and saying: “Hold on a sec, do you have a sample I can test?”
And the dealer saying: “Sure, take your time” before giving them a sample they know is “OK”.
The teen, satisfied, buys the drug — which could still kill him. That is the nature of drug taking.
By delegating to a test kit, we are dodging the hard stuff, the effort required to keep dialogue open with kids and use real-time opportunities to drive home an anti-drugs message.
Show them Whitney Houston. Show them George Michael. Two talents cut down thanks to drug abuse.
What happens if a kit says a substance is OK but it isn’t and a person overdoses or dies?
Does the kit manufacturer take responsibility? You can bet grieving parents will be out to blame anyone they can rather than accepting that it was their child who put a pill in their mouth.
And that’s what this all boils down to. Taking responsibility for yourself.
There are far more valuable things we should put time and effort into rather than helping people “safely” break the law.
Twitter @whatlouthinks
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/rende...l/news-story/f090e692508e4d3a671503ade59830a6
^ With many comments after the article.
