Source: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/06/22/1087844944452.html
Good to finally see some decent coverage in the media (and the source is equally interesting). Here is a transcript of the source interview (I think) (Source: http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2004/s1137603.htm):
Popping a party pill is not so abnormal
By Andrew Stevenson
June 23, 2004
Party drug use among young people is so prevalent, so infrequently intercepted by police and so rarely a cause of problems that society should rethink its attitude to drug policy, says the head researcher of a study of nightclub patrons.
The director of research at the Australian Drug Foundation, Cameron Duff, found that more than half the Melbourne nightspot patrons who were surveyed had tried ecstasy, cocaine, speed or ice. More than three-quarters knew regular users.
The survey, of 380 patrons, was completed last month and is a clear indication of the normalisation of recreational drugs.
"You're starting to see drug use spreading from an underground subculture very much into the mainstream," Dr Duff said.
"Yet we persist with the notion that most young people who use drugs are dysfunctional or delinquent in some way, that they're unemployed or not doing very well in school."
More than 90 per cent of the sample were working or studying, most of them full-time.
"They're just average, normal kids who happen to use party drugs, Dr Duff said.
"If you take away the drug use, you're talking about utterly typical young people. They're as normal as normal can be."
Ecstasy had been tried by 40 per cent of the sample, the same proportion as had tried cannabis. Almost as many had tried speed, 30 per cent had used cocaine and almost 20 per cent had used ketamine, a disassociative anaesthetic.
Surprisingly, more of the respondents were worried about their alcohol consumption than their use of party drugs.
Dr Duff's work suggests nightclub patrons' first worry when going out is what to "wear on the inside". Drugs are arranged well before they leave home, with two-thirds buying them from friends.
"It's almost the case that drug use itself has become the leisure activity," Dr Duff said.
"In the past, drug use was a way of enhancing another cultural experience, such as dancing or being at a party. Drug use seems to have become a leisure activity in its own right."
Figures provided to the Herald by the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research show how unlikely young users of ecstasy are to be caught by police. While criminal incidents of possession or use of marijuana totalled more than 11,000 a year in the state, police caught only 434 people with ecstasy last year.
The foundation's study also reinforced the scale of the party drug market, "of which all the corruption and murders in Melbourne is clearly the most abject manifestation", Dr Duff said.
He added that because the lives of those using drugs were holding together - and they were unlikely to face police sanction - two key triggers for drug users to seek treatment had been removed.
A few users encountered severe problems, he said, but most took party drugs two or three times a year without adverse consequences.
The challenge was how to respond, he said. "We provide drug education at school, and at the other extreme we've got treatment for people who've gone through their drug hell; but we don't do much once people have decided to use drugs.
"We need to think about how we can influence their behaviour in ways that lead them away from heavy to more moderate drug use."
Good to finally see some decent coverage in the media (and the source is equally interesting). Here is a transcript of the source interview (I think) (Source: http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2004/s1137603.htm):
ELEANOR HALL: Well, particularly in a school context the popularity of drugs like ecstasy has presented health and law enforcement authorities with a new set of problems and drug researchers, too, are now openly questioning whether preaching prevention, for so long the bedrock of drug education, is worth pursuing.
Doctor Cameron Duff, from the Centre for Youth Drug Studies at the Australian Drug Foundation, says many young drug users are well educated, well adjusted, and used to making their own decisions, and they're ignoring the message to stay away from drugs.
Dr Duff has been telling our Reporter Ben Knight that talking to young people about how to take drugs safely is far more likely to get their attention.
CAMERON DUFF: Lots of people have called this functional drug use, this notion of people using elicit drugs in their leisure time, for particular functional purposes. So it's to get more out of seeing a band, or it's to get more out of dancing.
So in that sense it has a function, and I guess the other sense of that meaning is that people integrate that drug use into other aspects of their life. So they're still getting up and going to work on Monday morning or going to university or whatever it might be. So their drug use is not having the types of detrimental consequences that we ordinarily expect.
When we think about young people's drug use, we typically think about dysfunctional use, we typically think about I guess the harms that are related to that use.
BEN KNIGHT: Does that mean that they've learnt to manage it?
CAMERON DUFF: Absolutely, well that's the picture that's emerging from the research, I suppose, that I've been doing lately.
I guess the way I think about it is it's like it's the big night out, you know, it's someone's birthday, it's New Year's Eve, it's these sorts of big events where it's a special occasion and people are using substances to enhance that experience, so they're not doing it very often.
BEN KNIGHT: Does that mean it's less dangerous?
CAMERON DUFF: Well, I mean this is the key question I think for us. If you talk to young people themselves, they don't identify this practice as dangerous at all.
And so, from my perspective as a researcher working in the field and trying to work on prevention strategies, how to sort of, how to um, ensure that the message of drug prevention is disseminated effectively, this research presents some real challenges because, I mean, basically young, these sorts of young people ignore prevention messages because in effect they've already made up their minds about these substances and how they manage these substances.
So it throws up some real challenges for us, which frankly we're struggling to deal with.
BEN KNIGHT: There's a lot of money and a lot of effort going into prevention. Are you saying it could be better directed and better spent?
CAMERON DUFF: I think that's part of it. I think that certainly we've spent a lot of money on drug education in schools in the last 15 to 20 years, and I think that what we're learning now is that there are right and wrong ways of doing drug prevention in schools through drug education, and I think probably in this country we're probably leading the world in getting that right. So I think it's important to make that point.
I'm not sure that we're doing other prevention strategies very well, and I guess the issue here is really, the key challenge for me from this research is the sense that we're probably starting to see this behaviour slip over into the mainstream of young people. I think that it's fair to say in the past in this country drug use was confined in lots of ways to minorities or subcultures within youth culture more broadly, and so you didn't typically see it amongst what might be described as mainstream youth cultures for a want of a better way of describing that.
But I think what we're seeing now is very much mainstream, middle class, educated employed young people. I mean, in every other respect these people are perfectly normal, perfectly functional, well-integrated young people and what we're seeing now is really drug use becoming more prevalent amongst that mainstream.
So I think there the challenge is how do manage that drug use? How do you ensure that that drug use isn't, doesn't escalate if you like, into more harmful patterns? And I think the challenge there is that what you're talking about is not saying no to drug use, but really how to use drugs more safely, and that I think creates enormous controversy, because for a lot of people, that's really difficult to understand. This notion that you could use illicit drugs safely is a real challenge and I think that's, as a society, that's a challenge that we're going to need to grapple with in the next five or ten years.
ELEANOR HALL: Dr Cameron Duff from the Centre for Youth Drug Studies at the Australian Drug Foundation speaking there to Ben Knight.
