I thank Rowan Fairburn and Nich Rogers for their timely article.

Teenagers today are literally bombarded by "Youth Culture" that doing drugs is fun, harmless, and a right of passage into adulthood. Disk jockeys on youth oriented radio constantly make snide references to illegal drugs, hinting to the young and impressionable that substance abuse is cool and hip. Youth pop magazines like "Muzic" give stories about the latest fashionable nightclubs, where twenty something patrons "dance with their arms in the air, clutching their water bottles."

Pop music is full of drug references, with illegal drugs like ecstasy given code names like "E" or "X". Pop stars like the execrable "Eminen" give performances on stage where they fumble in their pockets and "accidently" drop a pocketful of pills (or lookalikes) all aver the stage for the benefit of their young audience. Movies and TV shows show role model stars engaging in substance abuse as normal behaviour. While "Renton" in the movie "Trainspotting" applauds the effects of heroin by saying "Think of the best orgasm you ever had, multiply it by 1000 and you are not even close."

The result has been an upsurge of younger and younger children from even priveleged backgrounds who are becoming drug dependent or dying of overdoses. The time has come for stronger censorship of the entertainment industries.

If we as a society have the wit to understand the connection between tobacco advertising and youth smoking, why can we not make the same connection with the pop industry endoresment of illegal drugs and rising rates of drug abuse?

One wonders if the drug addled pop stars of today who promote themselves as the leaders of the young generation, are not getting kickbacks from the narcotrafficantes for promoting their wares.

‘One wonders if the drug addled pop stars of today who promote themselves as the leaders of the young generation, are not getting kickbacks from the narcotrafficantes for promoting their wares.’
Haha, you mean like when sports stars hawk beer?

The key here is a proper education on the dangers AND benefits of drugs. No one ever makes the claim that drugs are harmless. But the benefits are all too readily ignored. The abusers give the users a bad rep, the scare tactics are pulled out, and so on.

What you’re pointing too red, is rebellion. The youth are interested in it not despite it’s taboo, but rather because of it. If you keep telling a teenager lies like: ‘Marijuana will make you INSANE!!’ obviously they’re not going to believe it because they have excellent BS detectors. Unfortunately they may also not believe anything else you tell them, because the lies have tainted any good information that could be given to them.

In one or two states they have been trialling MDMA as an anti-depressant, and as I understand, with fairly decent results. Being familiar with the substance myself I can’t say I’m surprised. As long as it’s not mixed with crap, it’s not very dangerous at all. That’s a scientific fact. What makes a pill dangerous is the crap you get mixed in when you get it off the street. If things like this weren’t criminalised, you wouldn’t get any of the crap…does anyone see where I’m going with this?

But I digress. I’ve had much experience with people with depression, manic depression and even schizophrenia, and I can tell you right now, if drugs are on the list of causes, they’re way down the list after things like abuse and persecution.

I’m not advocating drugs at all. I’m just saying they shouldn’t be demonised, because then claims are made that are completely false, and ignorance never helped anyone.

I agree on the issue of disc jocks and the music multinationals making bucks by presenting drug abuse as cool. Look no further at our own government owned ABC Radio 2JJJ. The "J" being easily recognised on the street as the short form of "Joint".

It is time we had a really good look at this industry. And what is most apparent is that we are dealing with multinational corporations who play a key, and well documented role in the perceptual positioning behind the marketing of dangerous products without any chain of custody or responsibility. And many of its major beneficiaries then go on to assume positions of power and some prestige.

Take, for example, the Federal Member for Kingsford Smith, Peter Garret, who kicked off his music career by providing the mood music, if you will, in one of Sydney's most conspicuous "smack pits" just off Oxford Street Darlinghust back in the early 80's. I know, I was there. I drove taxi, night shift, out of Surry Hills. One got the impression there were more dealers in the audience than customers, who came, scored and left.

This is not, in any way, meant to suggest that Mr Garret was a dealer. But people who make millions flogging songs with a so-called "social conscience" should really be asked why it is that, apart from Neil Young and a few others, none of them appear to have troubled themselves to write songs about a serious social issue that was and remains, right under their very nose.

Given the number of deaths and the amount of human misery involved, the music industry has to do a whole better than merely say, "don't shoot me I'm only the piano player". They are bloody millionaires.

Well Rowan and Nick your title really got me in - then I found your article was on a different, albeit already familar, topic.

You see, I took your reference to "drug-related mental health problems" to mean the side effects and even direct effects of many mass market drugs that are said by drug companies to alleviate mental illness symptoms. There is growing evidence that many of these do not do what they are supposed, create new mental and other problems, and may in the long term leave a person taking them in a worse state than if they had never started.

Probably the best example of this is "Zoloft" (known generically as sertraline). This was the most prescribed drug in Australia ..period.. during financial year 2003. It is now banned for use on children and adolescents by the TGA because, although it is an anti-depressant, it can actually make young people suicidal!! What a strange world we live in when this can happen?

May I suggest in future that you insert the word "illicit" before the word "drug" so that folk like me will not begin reading your articles on the wrong foot. Otherwise, keep up the good work.

Cheers

Mark McMahon

Rowan and Nich

Thank you for your article.

I have been a psychiatric/mental health nurse since 1978. I guess I have seen most things in that time.

Certainly, the incidence of illicit drug induced psychosis, has been escalating - especially over the last 10 years.

It is important to note that young drug users are rarely on one substance - it is a polydrug use society for many young people.

I spent the last five years in community mental health nursing. Young people in NSW under 18 years of age have few places to go for help. Hardly any adolescent facilities and too young for adult facilities.

The last young person I nursed in a drug induced psychosis was on: legal bundy rum, and then the illegal stuff, vis a vis: potent hydroponic marijuana (enough to blow your head off without anything else), dropping a few "Es" or some "ice" and daitura (a South American plant more potent than magic mushies). This young person was floridly psychotic all of the time. His parents blamed me for not "curing" him. The bottom line was - I could not stop him using.

He was totally out of control and crazy. He did not think that there was anything wrong with him. Absolutely no insight. If his parents had let go, we might have stood a chance. I tried family therapy to no avail. They wanted me to fix everything - but they did not was to take any responsibility for their very poor relationship with their child.

Long hard battle on this one!
Cheers
Kay

In Australia we opted for the harm minimisation route to treatment. This means steering away from the disease concept and just accepting harmful drug behaviour as normal behaviour. Harm min has the difficulty of giving double messages to the user. On the one hand it says it's going to harm you if you use and in an unsterile way and on the other it says go ahead on smaller cleaner doses and we'll support you but we won't supply you the drug you want, only the harder nastier stuff the government hands out. Young people, in fact not just the young but all drug users are affected by prohibition now into our third generation in this country. As time goes on and the war against drug addicts progresses more people are killed off by unrealiable supply and more are shifted onto government substances which also kill off drug dependent people. The drug dependence problem just won't go away and the governments prohibition policy is killing off more people. Harm minimisation policy is a response by resposible health workers in combating prohibition. This is worth argusing about. I'd like to comment on the idea that a drug dependent person can have two or more diagnoses - comorbidity. This is a nonsense unless the client has been clean and sober for a period when a firm diagnosis can be made. The reason for this, as every informed drug worker knows, is that the symptons of drug dependence can mimic all forms of mental illness. This is why psychiatrists frequently mis-diagnose when they fail to take a drug/alc history. There are thousands of people in this country who have been mis-diagnosed in this way, I am one of them. It is not always the Drs fault because clients often won't reveal their drug use. However, it's a major problem. Depression is a common sympton of drug dependence and the last thing any responsible therpist would want to do is place a drug depressed person on antidepressants, but it happens all the time, it happened to me.
Good luck with the work - Barfenzie