Originally posted by eccitude
Now there's an opinion worth taking note of -- how childish. Hopefully the producer at Insight won't bother inviting you and your insight to participate.
Ohh well .. by tomorrow BT will have done his Thread Cleaned so all dissenting non-Sydney opinion will have been obliterated.
Firstly, please don't try and opportunistically occupy some kind of moral highground here, we are not trying to be big grown up mature boys who have to let formality get in the way of common sense - ofcourse Cowboy Mac would tell you to shut the fuck up when you are talking shit about Sydney and the rest of Australia and how Insight will be misrepresenting Australia by using a largely Sydney-based sample population - acknowledge that there are practical considerations that need to be made, and that people outside of Sydney don't have 4 brains and 10 pairs of legs and eat super-xtc so that means Insight won't be representing drug culture by being conducted in Sydney. Instead of being petulant and writing about BigTrancer gestapo conspiracies, try and stimulate some serious discussion of what your actual concern is by explaining it properly. (If you are just having a bad day for unrelated reasons, I'm sorry I don't mean to be aggressive, I'll be more understanding).
Until then, understand that Bluelight (as far as I'm concerned) is not a place where we look to have an automatic bitch about anything and everything that comes along to the forum from the outside. So relax and contribute more about your concerns regarding the Insight forum so that anyone in Sydney who might be participating can understand any variations in patterns/trends of party drug use and rave culture across Australia.
If you really think there is a significant difference in the use of party drugs and in rave culture from city to city, find some statistical evidence to back up what you are saying - look to NDARC figures relating to information gathered from studies in multiple cities and see if there really are big differences in the patterns of use of particular drugs.
From what I have gathered, the forum will be giving room for the discussion of how DRUG POLICY is/should be affected by recent trends in party drug use (i.e. expansion of rave culture being one example of increasing social prevalence of illicit drug use). It would not be dominated by discussion of "well when I go raving my friends sniff vicks directly from the tube and take 4 pills" vs "well when I go, we rub vicks on dust masks and plug 2 pills - it empathicasises our experiences", so I don't really think that it is too disastrous that most participants would be from Sydney.
So long as it can be agreed upon that the general trend is an increase in use of party drugs, a good discussion can be generated. And as others have already said on this forum, intelligent representatives speaking on behalf of harm-minimisation are needed if any kind of change in social attitudes toward illicit drugs and government policy is ever going to occur.
A forum like this could be a blow to the Howard government, and many conservative State governments, if those who espouse the tenets of harm-minimisation are willing and able to take advantage of the unique position Australia is in at the moment - a documented and significant increase in party-drug use, little or no evidence of a corresponding increase in associated morbidity+mortality, and a government composed mostly of knobs who spend money on superficial advertisements that attempt to scare rather than realistically educate DESPITE the failure of such campaigns to achieve their goals, as all you Bluelighters here surely know. What better state of affairs to argue for things like pill-testing at events, sponsored GC/MS of illicit tablets etc.?
So, think about participating, and save your diazepam for the big night (hey you KNOW I'm just joking about that....
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