SCARY DRUG ADS TREAT PARENTS AS DOPES

THOSE shocking drink-driving ads didn't stop us drink-driving.

What they did was to annoy the hell out of us. Viewers, readers, consumers
of culture, are so overloaded with messages that we can't take any more.

And I can tell John Howard, before he spends any more of my money on his
anti-drug campaign, that pictures of teenagers in body bags, prostituting
themselves, stealing all the advertisements in the world are not going to
stop children taking drugs.

It's not going to work for several reasons.

Overload is one. What we see, hear and read about drug abuse in Australia is
already very graphic. Shock tactics don't work, says Paul Dillon, National
Drug and Alcohol Research Centre information manager.

But, in their defence, he says the new drug ads are not designed for
children but for parents and to be used as a starting point in family
discussions. I'd like to see that myself. I can imagine the advertisement
would mostly pass over the screen unremarked.

The Prime Minister, who proves to be remote from ordinary family life in
Australia, says that I, as a parent, need to be conscripted into the battle
against drugs. He must be joking. I can think of no other group of people
which discusses the drug problem more than parents of teenagers.

Do they use? And if they use, how much do they use? Should we be worried? If
this last question comes as a shock, remember that the parents of these
teenagers were almost certainly all users themselves in the '70s.

User is a hard word because these days it implies strung-out junkies waiting
for their next hit. But in those days moderate use of marijuana was an
accepted part of teenage life, just as smoking tobacco was.

But we as parents have been exposed to a lot of information about marijuana
since then. We read that it is stronger now because it's farmed, that the
active chemicals are more concentrated. We hear that recreational speed
users, such as existed in the '70s and early '80s, don't exist any more
because the purity of the drug is unreliable; and that the people who sell
it are more likely to be business types who are straight themselves.

We hear a lot of stuff and God knows if it's right or not. Even the experts
disagree. At a drug-education night at one of the schools my children
attend, there were four experts with eight different opinions. The spectrum
goes from advising total abstinence to accepting that children will
experiment and teaching them to minimise the harm that drugs might do.

A senior Australian drug educator says the booklet that comes with the
advertisements does little to inform parents about why their children might
use drugs. Kids take drugs because it makes them feel good. What we as
parents need to do is to somehow teach our children to achieve those
feelings without chemical help.

An advertisement directed at parents needs to be far more moderate. It's
good that money is finally being spent on preventing young people from
taking drugs. It would be even better if that money was directed at the
right niche at children who are separated from their families, who are alone
and unsupported. They are the real kids at risk. Not the kids flopping with
their parents in front of Friends. The third ad in the series shows an ad
within the ad, with the teenager remarking that it's the drug ad again.

Maybe it's true that 50 per cent of parents don't speak to their kids about
drugs. But those people are not going to find themselves in intimate family
dialogue because of a terrifying ad.

We don't need any drug information to frighten us to death. We already are.