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Saturday night's all right for nitwits
Author: Lisa Pryor
I HAVE seen the best minds of my generation turn into nitwits and old wives when it comes to party drugs. Intelligent people who lose the power of rational thought come Saturday night. Who sweep aside everything they know about the dangers of mixing drugs. Who conduct their evenings according to the faulty folklore passed down from druggie to druggie.
In druggie folklore there is no danger to be found in combining stimulants and depressants. An evening should ideally begin with beers and vodka followed by ecstasy or cocaine at a nightclub. Then it is virtually mandatory to head back to someone's house at 4am to smoke cones, drink more beer and eat corn chips until the sun comes up. It takes the edge off the comedown, the mythology states.
In druggie folklore, dosage is based on rumour rather than science. You know that, say, snorting a certain number of lines of speed is "safe" if you hear a story about a friend's brother who once had three times that amount plus a couple of pills and didn't die. He just convulsed a bit.
You know that drug users have become totally immersed in druggie folklore when they start sounding like a wine critic, comparing the merits of the 2006 vintage with the 2002 vintage as if it were shiraz rather than ecstasy.
The people taking these risks are more likely to be twentysomethings than teenagers. When the National Drug Strategy Household Survey was conducted in 2004, one in eight twentysomethings admitted to having taken ecstasy in the previous year. Only one in 20 teenagers said the same, even though drugs are so often treated as a primarily teenage issue in television shows and drug campaigns, thick with scary images of teenage prostitutes and potheads.
It is a strange paradox that otherwise upstanding adults with jobs and hobbies and sporting fixtures don't conduct their drug taking in the same sensible fashion they conduct the rest of their lives. For some reason, people who carefully research which car they should buy or which mobile phone plan they should sign up for do not conduct the same due diligence when it comes to taking drugs. Which is kind of ironic given that drug taking carries a risk of getting arrested, falling ill or doing something really stupid like trying to fly.
Of course, one of the reasons for the woolly thinking that goes with drug taking is that rules set in sobriety can dissolve once the effect of a drug takes hold. Promises to only take one pill and be home by midnight are forgotten. Suddenly and inexplicably, it is 4am and the drug takers realise they are eating a cheeseburger under fluorescent lights at McDonald's with some strangers.
It is also possible that recreational drug users deliberately remain ignorant, even before the effects of the drug have taken hold. It would, like, totally ruin the whole vibe if you acknowledged that your big night out could end in cardiac arrest, kidney failure or a police cell.
For those who choose not to remain ignorant, it can be hard to find factual, impartial information, no matter how many times you search Google. The erratic make-up of drugs, which vary in quality and concentration with every batch, can thwart attempts to understand what it is you're taking. There is little value knowing the effects of ecstasy if the "ecstasy" you buy is actually a mixture of speed, horse tranquilliser and icing sugar.
As the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre explains on its website, it is not possible to judge the quality of a pill by the brand name stamped across it. Once a brand has a good reputation, fakes are produced to cash in. The reputation of the brand is then ruined and new brands are produced, in a cycle lasting about six months.
As for official information, it is much easier to find warnings about the importance of abstaining from drugs than it is to find information on how to take them safely. There is plenty of information about the importance of not driving after you have taken drugs, for example. But how soon after taking drugs is it safe to drive? Eight hours? Two days? A week? Does it depend on whether you've taken ecstasy or marijuana? Does it depend on an individual's metabolism? Who knows?
The scary thing is that thousands of people answer questions like this for themselves every weekend based on nothing more than a hunch.
From Sydney Morning Herald, 25/02/2006. News and Features, Page 40.
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EDIT:
Contact details
Lisa Pryor @ SMH
(02) 9282 2059
[email protected]
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