Don't panic: experimenting with drugs is a choice, not a fait accompli
Date: 02/04/2001
Australia's children are not all helpless blobs who will blindly jump at the chance to take illegal drugs as soon as they are offered to them, writes Sally Loane.
At lunch recently with some ladies who lunch I confessed that I had never seen cocaine. Once they had picked their jaws up from the table I also admitted that neither would I recognise an ecstasy tablet if I fell over one.
The last time I saw dope was back in the days of T-Rex (the dinosaur and the rock band). It was a sodden fag-end in a roach clip being passed around at a party, and it bore a distinct resemblance to a dead slug.
Then there was the time, a few years back, when I was interviewing a chap who kept disappearing to the lavatory. When I told someone about this later, I mentioned that he must have had a weak bladder, perhaps because of the copious amounts of orange juice he was drinking. "You idiot," she chortled. "He was doing coke. They drink a lot of orange juice."
Oh right. It's not as though I've lived a sheltered life - a 25-year career as a journalist, three years in the Canberra press gallery, uni in the '70s, inner-city living, eastern suburbs dinner parties, even artists for friends - it's just that I've never come across drugs or the drug scene.
"But you must have," my lunch mates insisted. "They're everywhere."
That's what we're told, every day. Blizzards of cocaine from Vaucluse to Leichhardt and buckets of heroin from Redfern to Cabramatta. Shake out anyone under the age of 35 and you'll get enough ecstasy to fill an Olympic swimming pool.
There's no doubt that the drug problem is huge. It is the biggest fear of every parent I know. We are constantly told our children will be offered drugs and they will try them. We constantly talk about how to drug-proof our children, whether there's anything that will save them from what it seems will be an unavoidable and inevitable stage of life.
In the week that the Federal Government's anti-drug campaign began on television I wondered whether we were getting a bit too hysterical. Too fearful.
The image we're creating is of a generation of children who are helpless blobs, ripe for someone to come along and get them onto drugs.
Surely, since humans crawled out of the primordial swamps there have been two distinct groups of us: those who try illegal drugs and those who don't.
The ones who never try them are not interested in them and never will be, despite any amount of temptation. Of those who try drugs, some will either pass them up or use them intermittently, and some will develop an addiction.
Driving the kids home from school last week we were listening to my 702 colleague Richard Glover interview experts on the Government's strategy, all of them exhorting parents to talk to their children about drugs. "Yes Mum, talk to us about drugs," piped up two small voices from the back of the car.
Being six and eight, they have no concept of illegal drugs. To them drugs are what doctors give you when you're sick, to make you well.
It was a challenge to try to explain that the other sort of drugs, the bad, illegal ones, could make you sick. They were barely interested in this, pushing me to talk about stuff they did recognise, alcohol and cigarettes. Too much of them, I explained, could also make you very sick. I uttered a silent prayer that at least their generation would not be like mine - we drank like fish and drove cars. So many of us did not survive that lethal combination. There was always a car-full killed after a B&S in the bush, a marathon drinking session that continued all the way home.
Thanks to drink driving campaigns, fines, licence confiscations and random breath testing, we've at least created a change of mind-set in some of this generation about drinking and driving. It's not cool.
For this reason, John Howard's anti-drug strategy is worth a go, shocking images and all.
The kids will probably dismiss it, because they are certain that won't happen to them.
For every body bag there's a hundred live and healthy idols like Nicole Kidman who freely admit to using drugs. It's aimed at us adults, to get us talking, and talking to our kids.
Just don't let it scare you out of your wits.
