He Said She Said

IS THERE ANY WAY WE CAN STOP OUR KIDS FROM USING DRUGS AND ALCOHOL?

Pardon me for being cynical, but shouldn't we bit a tad suspicious
when an organization whose raison d'etre is dealing with substance
abuse issues a report that indicates more kids are doing drugs and
drinking alcohol at an earlier age?

The Addictions Foundation of Manitoba unleashed a flood of statistics
last week which are clearly meant to be alarming.

Manitoba students begin smoking at 13, although most are 11 when they
start.

Kids take their first drink at age 13, although most of them are at
least 12 when they start.

The percentage of high school students who tried drugs other than
marijuana at least once in the past year: magic mushrooms 15.1%;
powder cocaine, 4.5; ecstasy 4.3; LSD, 3.8; stimulants, 3.5; crack
cocaine, 3. 3; methamphetamine, 2.7; inhalants, 2.3.

Of the females who use marijuana more than once a month, 45.6% report
an average shoe size of 6.75; 63.8% of the males an average shoe size
of 9.85.

81% of students drank alcohol in the past year, the same rate
estimated for Manitoba adults.

30% of students who drink do it in cars, while 15% drink at school
during school hours.

These are just some of the figures from the AFM's survey of substance
use among Manitoba high school students.

Well ... except for that stuff about the shoe sizes. I lied about the
shoe sizes.

But I bet most of you didn't even notice the presence of that
fictional and nonsensical nugget of information buried amid the pileup
of percentages which did appear in the report.

(In Lyn Cockburn's case, the challenge is to find a single pebble of
common sense amid the nuggets of nonsense she piles up every Sunday.)

The point is, even assuming they've been collected and tabulated
correctly, even assuming the kids providing them told the truth, even
assuming none of them aren't as irrelevant as my fictional shoe-size
figures -- what are we to make of this blinding blizzard of statistics?

Other than we really need the AFM and it really needs more
money?

Like I said, pardon me for being cynical.

But when any organization releases a great burst of statistics that
explode in our faces like a huge flock of pigeons suddenly released
from their cages, we should quell our panic enough to question the
wisdom of accepting both the accuracy of the figures themselves and
the validity of the implications we are expected to draw from them.

And what are those obvious conclusions?

They're reflected in the headlines concerning the AFM survey which
appeared in both daily newspapers:

Kids are doing drugs at younger age, read one; Drug, alcohol use
continue to climb among teenagers, read another.

Excuse me for raising a hand to my mouth to stifle a yawn rather than
smother a scream of shock and outrage.

Either of those headlines could have appeared newspapers printed 40
years ago. Make that 50 years ago.

The headlines should have read:

Kids today: the same old same old

Drug education proves next to useless.

Rather than proving the effectiveness of drug and alcohol education,
the AFM report only serves to demonstrate what a failure it's been.

The problem is, education is not wisdom. And wisdom, as student
Melanie Sabourin proved, is in short supply among high school kids.

"It's best to do (drugs) in front of your parents than behind their
backs," said Sabourin.

No, it isn't.

The dangers drugs hold for kids have nothing to do with that kind of
trendy, feel-good crap.

If dope or booze is going to screw up your life, it doesn't matter who
you're with when you smoke it, sniff it, pump it into your veins or
guzzle it.

Of course, I doubt Melanie will listen.

And again, pardon my cynicism.

By LYN COCKBURN -- Winnipeg Sun

Nancy Reagan once said, "Just say no to drugs" and washed her hands of
the whole problem. Ross does her one better -- he just washes his
hands of it. Period. End of story.

He buries the problem of kids and drugs under a world-weary carpet of
'I've heard it all before' and 'What's the point of trying to educate
the little rats.'

Using that kind of mindless logic, Alcoholics Anonymous and all our
drug rehabilitation centres had best close down tomorrow. What's the
point, after all? Hasn't alcoholism been around since the beginning of
time? Aren't we all just ever so tired of it by now?

Ross could have begun and ended his column with "I don't give a damn"
- -- with I might add, no words in between. Easier to stomach, that way.

Some of us, however, do care. We want our kids to have a chance to
grow up to have the same opportunities as we did -- even the same
opportunities Ross did. He coulda been a contendah, but settled for
terminal cynicism instead.

Kids are our future. They are the doctors, truck drivers, journalists,
teachers, hairdressers and auto mechanics of tomorrow -- they are not
so much dross that we discard at will. Or if we do, we do it at our
peril. So best we cherish them. Best we nurture them, best we permit
them to blossom, best we help them to do their very best. And when
they don't, best we should pick them up, dust them off and set them on
the path again.

When it comes to drugs, just how do we do that? Let me count the ways.
Education is only one of those ways -- it is not the panacea for all
ills. Of course we can fill our kids full of facts about drugs, about
alcohol, about tobacco and many of them will try them anyway. I did.

And I did it in a time when there were no drug dealers hanging around
school yards, when kids were not bombarded at every turn with media
images urging them to grow up far too quickly.

Nonetheless, I woke up one morning and found to my horror that I had
crawled inside a beer bottle and that I seemed to have been there for
awhile. Yes, I crawled out in large part due to my own determination,
but I was also surrounded by people who said "Good for you" and "I'm
proud of you." Nobody said wearily, "How boring, I've heard all this
before."

A hungry kid is a susceptible kid -- susceptible to everything from
gangs to drugs to crime. A kid with addicts for parents has no role
models to base his own life on; a kid who is abused will look for
attention in all the wrong places, and find it.

A kid who comes from a home where there is no discipline whatsoever
does not learn where the boundaries lie.

And some parents have no idea how to communicate with their kids --
about drugs, sex, alcohol ... all that messy stuff. And some adults
have no idea how to listen to teenagers.

Yet after all is said and done, any number of kids do drugs just for
the hell of it. Just like adults. Funny, that.

Obviously, I don't have all, or maybe even any, of the answers and I
suspect nobody else does either. What I do know is that the problem of
kids and drugs is not one we can afford to turn our backs on. We have
to keep chipping away at it, with some education here, food there. In
part, the solution lies in giving kids hope, education, enough to eat,
a safe place to live, jobs and so on ... when it comes to creating a
whole human being, the list is a long one.

And when our kids screw up, we must be prepared to give them a second
and a third chance. It is after all, what we as adults expect from the
world.

Don't believe me? You could look it up. Innumerable companies pay for
rehab programs for employees -- for adults who have screwed up through
using drugs and drinking to excess. Only the employees who cannot or
will not crawl out of the bottle or the drug-induced haze eventually
get fired.

It is my contention that we as adults have no business firing our
kids. And we have no business painting the canvas of their problems
with our own dark world-weary cynicism.

Lyn Cockburn is editor of the Winnipeg Sun.