johnboy
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Oct 27, 1999
- Messages
- 6,873
Not a bad article here. I hate what the subs did with the headline and accompanying picture tho. Cliche-ville. I did the interview for this ages ago. All of these stories have been sat on until the research from NDARC was officially released by the gov. I'm not really sure it has to tell the truth.
As unofficial websites on recreational drugs increase, advocates argue the more information the better, but critics say they offer easy temptation and a forum for dealers, writes Dan Stapleton.
A net-savvy generation of recreational drug users can now get high and outsmart the police at the click of a mouse.
It is possible to chat online with users of almost every recreational drug. Net surfers can find out how to create illegal drugs from legal substances. They can socialise, find out what to do if a friend overdoses and read about the experiences of other drug users. Recreational pharmaceuticals, such as codeine, can be ordered from foreign countries and through networking in online communities, arrangements can be made to buy hard drugs in person.
Most nights, 16-year-old Katie* divides her time between homework and surfing the net. Last week she was thinking of trying the drug GHB for the first time, so she researched the liquid chemical (sometimes called Liquid E or Fantasy) at a drug information website.
She regularly checks out the latest pill reports at an online drug forum and arranges - via an online chat program - to buy marijuana from friends at school.
Katie finds the internet invaluable for drug information. "It's not as if I spend all my time talking about drugs," she says. "But if I need information, I know where to find it."
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She is one of thousands of Australians who frequent unofficial drug websites for information, advice and camaraderie. The use of the internet by drug users worries some law enforcers and health authorities. While there are some benefits from "user-to-user" websites, there are concerns about the quality of information they provide, says Paul Dillon, a spokesman for the National Drugs And Alcohol Research Centre at the University of NSW.
"I think it's important that people have forums to discuss anything, and drug use is included in that. There are very well-intentioned people involved in these websites, but sometimes they simply get the facts wrong. A lot of the advice that people take as medical fact is really just anecdotal. We don't know all of the facts about drugs yet."
The websites are caught in the middle of the classic drug debate: harm minimisation versus zero tolerance. But with an unmoderated medium like the web there is little authorities can do to regulate the information flow.
In 2002 a highly publicised website called Sniffer Dog Alert, which informed drug users on how to avoid sniffer dog hotspots via email or SMS, was shut down by the NSW police minister, Michael Costa, after hundreds of thousands signed up. Drug site advocates have responded with vigorous campaigns attempting to secure political support for user-to-user drug information on the internet. One of the reasons why unofficial drug sites are far more popular than official sites, such as the site for the federal Minister for Health, Tony Abbott, and the NSW Department of Health, is that official sites have no forum for drug users to exchange information and experiences.
The Australian Drug Foundation website (www.adf.org.au) has basic information on recreational drugs and offers academic resources relating to the drug debate. It does not offer the experiences of drug users.
Abbott said this week that he did not know what any of the unofficial sites said. "This interview is the first time I've heard of them," he said. "But any site encouraging drug use is encouraging its readers to dice with death. It's incredibly irresponsible of them."
Official concerns do not end with publicly accessible websites. "There is more than just web pages to the internet," the former head of the Australian High Tech Crime Centre, Alastair McGibbon, said at the Australasian Drug Strategy Conference in Alice Springs, in May. Email, online chat programs, newsgroups, free internet phone services, and "peer-to-peer" internet technologies "may also be used to link buyers and those selling illicit drugs", McGibbon said.
There is an astonishing range of information about drugs online - and not just their ingredients and effects.
"In much the same way that governments and businesses are now questioning the level and detail of information on their webpages which may be misused by terrorists, there is data online which can assist a person involved in illicit drugs: information ranging from drug 'recipes' through to the sailing dates and routes of ships which may be carrying illicit cargo to the ability to track parcels sent via couriers," McGibbon said.
"Information regarding restricted precursor chemicals (and substitutes) is widely available, including locations where these chemicals can be purchased. Information as to the purchase of specialised laboratory equipment is also available."
Ben* is a student at the University of Sydney. He is a frequent poster on a drug information site, and uses the web to keep track of new pills on the dance-party drug market. He is adamant these websites are beneficial to drug users. "Of all the people I know who do drugs the most intelligent and rational ones are those who are involved in online drug communities," he says. "They know about harm minimisation and which pills to avoid."
Information is "the key to all harm reduction", says John Davidson, who works for such a site. "It's only when people have all the available facts that they can make mature decisions - and the emphasis there is on mature."
Davidson believes the proliferation of unofficial online sources of drug information is a reaction to a lack of straight-talking information in mainstream media.
"The rise of the internet came at the end of the '80s - the time of the Just Say No campaigns. Ecstasy was being used by more and more people and the disconnect between the reality of their lives and the horror stories the media was trying to pass off as truth led many to seek their own answers."
Unofficial drug information websites arose out of this desire for non-biased information. "The old paradigm was of top-down broadcast media, where governments would make authoritative statements on 'the truth' about drugs and the public would have no alternative source of information."
Some websites and online forums go much further than supplying information about drugs. In March journalists from Melbourne's Sunday Age reported finding various recipes to make GHB within minutes of searching the web. Responding to the report, Cameron Duff, the director of research at the Australian Drug Foundation's Centre for Youth Drug Studies, said earlier this year that it would be easy to produce GHB with the help of instructions obtained online. "I've been told that anyone with basic undergraduate chemistry can manufacture it," he said.
While most forums make explicit requests not to post any information about obtaining illegal substances, it's easy to read between the lines.
Says Ben: "The first time I scored acid was through a member of an online forum. After a while, it's easy to spot the posters [or forum members] who deal as well."
Professor Enrico Coiera, a University of NSW academic who is researching ways of providing online information for doctors and patients, says the web has an important role to play in disseminating information about recreational and pharmaceutical drugs.
"We know that people are seeking information from a variety of sources and that includes going to the web. The real question is: how do we inform consumers about where to look and how to assess what they find?
"If you want to go on a holiday, you'll do your own research, then go to a travel agent to discuss your broad itinerary. The same should apply to drug use, be it pharmaceutical or recreational. My view is that [illicit drugs] are exactly the things you should be talking to your GP about."
But Coiera's message is one of caution. His sentiment echoes the concerns that sections of the community have always had - that as drugs become more widely discussed and distributed, it will become easier for users to go too far. For parents, that perspective is made more pertinent by the swiftly dropping age of computer literacy: many primary school children can use their computers better than their mums and dads.
"There is so much information online and it's very hard to know whether it's written by people with no bias, or people with a view to push," says Coiera. "There's no way of telling if there's a conflict of interest."
Biased or not, Australia is faced with a new paradigm - when it comes to finding out about recreational drugs, the method of choice is surfing the web. As consumers dissect these ever-growing sources of information, they'll become more clued in as to what will get them high, and how to go about it. Whether that's a good thing remains to be seen.
* Not their real names.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/10/10/1097406428128.html?from=storylhs
