to The Journalist
First of all, hello and welcome to Bluelight! Thank you for coming into our forum to respond to our views on your article - it really is much appreciated, despite the hostile atmosphere. Please realise that most of the members of our community are recreational drug users, and as such we are used to consistently being portrayed in a negative light by the media, hence we tend to be a little over-defensive
That said, there are a few points in your article that do smack of poor research. Yes, methamphetamine can be a dangerous, psychosis-stimulating drug
when abused - few people in here are debating that. Our major criticism is your assumption that banning paraphenalia will reduce methamphetamine use. Have you researched into amphetamine use patterns in relation to market supply and price as well as relative availability of paraphenalia? Have you looked into the addictiveness of methamphetamine (use required, degree of addictiveness, mode of addiction, etc)? It would also have been useful if you had explained
how methamphetamine use can lead to psychosis and violent behaviour. You seem to be overly focussing on the issue of pipe availability, rather than the issues of true importance: methamphetamine availability and use patterns and impacts of use.
As has previously been mentioned, many of us believe (through personal experience and via research papers) that paraphenalia availability has little real impact on illicit drug consumption. People who were already using/interested in using crystalline meth may experiment with a pipe, however few people who had not previously considered experimenting with the drug would be likely to reconsider their choice in light of a novel method of ingestion.
So if you take the view (as most people experienced with recreational drug use will tell you) that people will use if they want to, regardless of implement, banning one of the safer methods of administering a drug makes no sense at all. If people want to try crystalline meth, they will. They may smoke it from a pipe - the safest method of smoking the drug - or from a foil or a lightbulb, despite the increased risks of the latter methods. They may choose to crush it up, cut it and snort it, or, as with my encounter with the drug, dissolve it and drink it. Bluelight is dedicated to promoting
harm minimisation, so I'm sure you can see why we believe banning pipes completely to be a bad idea. Not only does it contradict our harm minimisation philosophy, through personal experiences we don't believe it will greatly impact methamphetamine use patterns.
You mentioned later about pipes being passed around like joints at parties. Judging by the responses this comment generated, I suspect no Bluelighters have ever seen such a practise. Your story does, however, focus on the upper classes, and perhaps Toorak teenagers do have the funds available to shout their friends a "hit" (I assume you mean a point - i.e. 0.1g) each at $30-$40 per person. As you realise, this is an unrepresentative and small social subset, and it is a pity that your article focuses on this fraction of society. Methamphetamine use is not restricted to the upper classes, nor are addiction and psychosis. Likewise, addiction and psychosis are not restricted to meth users.
As phase-dancer elucidated, drug (ab)use is often not the cause of psychotic behaviour, but merely a trigger. But this is not a debate about broader mental health issues. Your article was largely emotively based, rather than researched, which is a major criticism of Herald Sun journalism. This is highlighted by this sentence in particular:
Major shopping centres have the pipes on display in full view of window shoppers and children.
What is seeing a pipe in a window going to do to a child? They'd have no idea what is was, and likely wouldn't even pay it any heed, but you play the emotive card, after all, doesn't everyone want to protect the children? Although that's not to say that many of us don't agree with you in part: there is no need for smoking implements
of any kind to be displayed openly in stores. All forms of smoking are hazardous to health and as such it is desirable not to promote any form of smoking. Perhaps a better (and more likely to deliver desirable outcomes for all parties) campaign would be to prevent public display of pipes, bongs, etc but to permit stores to stock them behind counters and without promotional advertising (as with all forms of tobacco in QLD).
I hope you can appreciate our views on this topic and understand that we probably understand more about drug-taking behaviours than your average Joe. If you really want to minimize the incidence of meth-induced violence and psychosis, honest public
education about the effects of the drug, backed up by scientific research is probably your best bet.
Please stay and have a look around our site - I think you will find things to interest you; perhaps
here ,
here, and
here.
For non-Bluelight information on methamphetamine, perhaps
this and
this may be useful.
Smiley
