Youth to Have a Say at International Drugs Conference
Friday 10 May 2002.
Young people from the Sydney metropolitan region will have their say and be heard by international youth and drug experts at a specially convened youth panel on Monday, which is the first day of the 3rd International Conference on Drugs and Young People.
The panel will be chaired by Triple J announcer Adam Spencer and will feature young speakers from local schools and youth organisations who will talk from another perspective about drugs.
The panel is a highlight on day one of the conference, which is being attended by more than 500 national and international experts on drugs and youth issues.
The opportunity to speak and be heard on this issue by adult experts is rare for young people and should provide an interesting discussion session.
Young people are also assisting to chair other sessions at the three-day conference and writing a daily newspaper.
Other than the youth panel, the young peoples' participation was really just token involvement. There wasn't even a mention of the involvement of actual young drug users, or any drug users for that matter. The conference had the distinct feeling that a whole range of "experts" were basically talking about young people behind their back. There was no oppurtunity to raise these concerns at all. In fact, it seemed like they were aware of this issue from previous conferences, and had gone all out to reduce the oppurtunity for comment on the conference itself. The conference evaluation form even failed to mention young peoples' participation or the issue of access to the conference for young people (it was $300 for student/unwaged for the whole confernce). We were amongst only a handful of young people attending the conference, and an even smaller number of young people actually presenting papers.
The youth panel was somewhat informative. I'm not sure where these young people came from, or how representative they were. Prior to the youth panel, Special Minister of State (NSW) John Della Bosca spoke about the value of this conference, and how he can't wait to hear of the outcomes, and to hear what the young people had to say. He promtly left after this speech, and missed any of the comments from the young people. One of the young people mentioned this fact, and the audience cracked up. There is a fairly high level of cynicism towards politicans in the drug and alcohol field, and it showed. Della Bosca came out with lots of meaningless buzzwords, about how much his government relies on evidence based practice, community capacity building etc etc. He mentioned how frigtening it was that many young people think Es are slightly more dangerous than alcohol, tobacco, inhalants and pot and then went on to say that drug educators need to tell the truth, and not exagerate potential drug related harms... So, who's truth are we talking about??? He also mentioned "so called recreational drug use" and how this term has implied a normailisation of drug use in "youth sub-cultures" (whatever that means). I just think that politicians are the last people that should enter into drug debates. Politics and drugs just don't mix. How can you hope to have a balanced, even handed approach to drug issues when so much of politics is driven by talk back radio and "A Current Affair"? Mr Della Bosca believes that we can separate ideology from drug debates by using evidence based practice. He failed to acknowledge that so much drug and alcohol research is ideologically driven, and ideologically read. Evidence based practice sounds great, but in practice its not that simple.
The first key note speaker was Ms Sheila Henderson, whose paper was titled
"On a Road to Nowhere? Young People, Drug Use and Social Exclusion in the UK". Not what I was expecting at all, from the title. She basically looked at two areas: How does social background affect drug use and life opportunities? and Does drug use have long term predictable bad effects on young people? She was very interested in the idea of transition in life (ie childhood to adolescence, primary to high school, high school to uni etc). She used two case studies. Both were 16 year old young women, who had been disapproving of drug use while in early adolescence, yet by the age of 16, they had started taking Es are going out to niteclubs. Their patterns of use were both similar. Both reported an E "honeymoon" for the first year of their E use, whereby they thought Es were the best thing since sliced bread. During this year, they used Es "frequently". I'm not sure exactly how much actual use this means, or if other drugs were also used. These two young women came from very different social backgrounds. One was from Northern Island, and had been exposed to high levels of violence around the sectarian issues of the region. She lived on "the wrong side of the tracks" in a poor family etc etc etc... All the stereotypical risk factors that always get wheeled out. The other young woman came from a wealthy family in a nice area etc etc. The woman from the "at risk" background gave up E use after her first year "honeymoon", because she wanted to become a nurse, and felt Es would make it harder for her to concentrate at uni. The other young woman from the well-off background became a podium dancer at her favourite nightclub, almost got sacked because of her excessive drug use, but then slowly reduced her drug use over a few years, but continued to use Es, and saw it as not much of an issue. The conclusion of this presentation was that life outcomes are unpredictable when considering drug use, and that heavy drug use is often related to transition, and perhaps problematic drug use comes from some kind of problem in transition phases of life. Overall, a very interesting talk.
The next key note speaker was Dr Marsha Rosenbaum's
"Ecstasy: The New Reefer Madness". There's already been a thread on this, as it was reported in the press. This thread is
here. The URL for the press release based on Dr Marsha's talk is
here. She's a very brave woman saying what she does in the US. She has actually managed to get into the various Parent Teacher Associations in the US and help them form policies on drug education in schools. The Parent Teacher Associations in the US are nothing like our's in Australia. In the US they have a huge amount of power in terms of what goes on in the actual curriculum, such as what sort of drug ed kids get a school. Hopefully, Dr Marsha's talks will be posted in full in the next week or so. I'll put it in the thread thats already been started about her talk.
Next, I went off to a session about "On Line Education". First talk was about "Drug Education in the Virtual World: An Assessment of Electronic Drug Prevention Resources". Basically, it was an English guy talking about some of the CD-Rom based drug prevention "games" for use in schools. The guy was so wrapped up in the technology, he forgot to consider all of the problematic areas of drug use prevention strategies. These include using scare tactics and misinformation, and a general "drugs are bad, m'kay" type of approach. And all the games looked really lame too, just to top it off.
Next was a talk called "Teens On Line for Life Advice: Youth Empowerment via the Internet". This was about a website designed by the Austrlain Drug Foundation (who organised the conference). It was one of the very few presentations actually made by a young person. The URL for the website they are talking about is
here. Not much interesting in this presentation. Check
this URL for a summary.
Other interesting talks on this day included:
"Mixing with Hairdressers" (study showing hairdressers to be big drug users). Summary of this is
here.
"What has tax and public transport got to do with youth drug use?" (no summary available, but basically looking at the idea of social cohesion and drug use. The idea was that the more public transport is used, the higher the rates of social cohesion, and community spirit etc. This, along with other similar social factors needs to be addressed when looking at problematic drug use).
"Are Some Approaches to Youth Drug Use Doing More Harm than Good?" (Summary is
here)
Also an evaluation of harm minimisation approach in a South Austrlian school for kids that don't get on well in regular schools was presented. Some of the kids were pretty heavy cannabis and alcohol users. The school promoted a "self-help" philosophy, whereby the kids are alowed to decide if they want to come to school or not. If they turn up smashed, they're asked to go home for the day, and then there's a discussion about it the next day. This approach was mirrored at many levels of the school, in different ways. The evaluation showed that the kids use of cannabis and alcohol had reduced across the board, their attendence levels had increased, and their opinions about school and teachers had changed significantly for the better.
Dr Marsh Rosenbaum (who gave the talk on Ecstasy: The New Reefer Madness) gave another talk called "Safety First: A Reality Based Approach to Teens, Drugs and Drug Education". This talk started with Dr Marsha's account of her exchange with a San Francisco newspaper editor, on the issue of drug education. The editor told Dr Marsha that if she would write a letter to her own teenage son about everything she thought he needed to know about drugs, her letter would be published. So Dr Marsha wrote a letter telling her son about the potential negative consequences of drug use (in realistic terms) and finished with a paragraph that started "If you do choose to use ecstasy, there are some other things you need to know. If you're dancing, you'll need to drink adequate water, but not too much, etc etc etc." When the entire talk is posted on the ADF website, I'll post the URL in the other thread about "Ecstasy: The New Reefer Madness".
Day one finished up with a really interesting talk from Lowitja O'Donoghue called "New Habits Die Hard" about the current situation with Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander young people and drug use. Her talk covered a huge amount of ground. I'll wait until this is available online. It really was one of the best talks of the whole conference.
So that was day one in rough...I'll finish the rest sometime during the week. There's some really good stuff to come too
[ 20 May 2002: Message edited by: hardup ]
