DUPING DOPERS

YOU don't have to be Einstein to know why young people take drugs. It's one
of those things. They just do. And for a while, so did I.

When I was younger, so much younger than today, I never needed anybody's
help in any way to convince me that experimenting with drugs and alcohol
was a rite of passage. My parents were scrupulous in their efforts to drum
into my adolescent head the perils of sniffing and smoking this, swallowing
and injecting that.

At various junctures in my teens, they sat me down in the evenings after my
brothers had gone to bed and spoke to me of Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison,
Janis Joplin and other musical heroes of mine who exemplified how, no
matter how powerful, talented and blessed they might have seemed at one
time, they could still end up six feet under in a helluva hurry because
they were no match for the power of drugs.

But one of the symptoms of adolescence is the conviction that one's parents
are outdated fuddy-duddies trying to inflict the notions of the olden days
on the generation of the future. Which means, despite vowing and declaring
that no unnatural substances apart from my mother's cooking would ever
enter and befoul my pristine system, I had already filed their warnings
under 'I' for Ignore.

I had done the same with other advice, although I now know I should have
listened when they told me that platform heels indeed look silly, orange is
not my colour, my efforts at growing a goatee were doomed to fail and
Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet is really a crock.

Mind you, rite of passage or not, I would never have injected anything.
Apart from an aversion to any needle that's not knitting me socks or a nice
cardie, I always knew heroin was a fool's folly.

But as for sniffing, smoking and swallowing . . . what harm could these do?
After all, if my body could withstand the horrors of my mother's carrots,
it could withstand anything.

And so it was, one evening in a dingy Launceston room with a Morning of the
Earth poster on one wall and a Tangerine Dream album on the stereo, I made
myself comfortable in a purple beanbag and reached out when the marijuana
joint eventually came my way.

It was the first joint I'd ever seen, crudely-rolled, horribly wet at one
end, long as a drumstick and thick as a Hobart student. I sucked on it like
a new Hoover, holding in the smoke for as long as I could to better
alleviate its messing with my mind.

While others in the room talked about seeing the souls of trees, shapes in
the ceiling, lyrics in Tangerine Dream's instrumentals and colours of which
the spectrum was entirely ignorant, I waited for my high.

I felt a heavy weight on the top of my head and it pushed me deeper and
deeper into the beanbag. Unable to find any strength to fight it, I
surrendered meekly. The joint returned and again I played Mr Hoover.

This time, however, the weight pushed beyond my brain and into my stomach,
the contents of which I hurled across the room in a fountain of red and
green, ruining a plate of chips and a carafe of Stone's green ginger wine.

"It's all right," said a mate, "everyone pukes the first time. In fact,
Dave pukes every time. He's a laugh. He just loves his dope."

Over the next few years, my mates and I steered clear of Dave but
experimented with this and that, pooling our pennies to find the $30 for a
bag of dope, the $50 for acid or whatever.

We played in a band and there was always someone ready to offer you
something for after the gig. We were hardly the Grateful Dead and our drug
of choice was beer and nicotine but we dabbled.

I ended my connection with drugs completely in my early 20s, having started
work at the local paper and having seen their effect on a former Australian
schoolboy champion athlete turned newspaper photographer turned gibbering
idiot. His life was my lesson.

Occasionally, there were comic aspects to his addiction. Like the time we
were sent to the airport to witness a demonstration by drug sniffer dogs.
The hounds picked up the scent coming from his camera bag in seconds and
almost ripped it to shreds. But there were more disturbing moments. The way
he walked, never stepping on the cracks because, as he told me: 'If you do,
the monsters will get you'. It was funny until I realised he truly was
terrified.

Today, my former friend and colleague, whose gifts were many but whose
brain is now mush, lives in a VW Beetle in northernTasmania. Sometimes he
knocks at my mother's door, tries to remember her name and asks for food or
a few dollars. Anyway, the point of all this is this week's news about the
presence on the Gold Coast of the so-called pseudo-drug Nemesis - geez, the
name's bad enough - which is said to mimic the effects of speed, acid and
ecstasy.

Let me get this straight . . . so to speak . . . this is a drug which is
not really a drug but which simulates the highs of other drugs which, as
part of their own modus operandi, alter the perceptions and create a false
sense of well-being. In other words, we're faking something unnatural in
order to artificially fake something unnatural. Huh? How dumb have we become?

While I realise I'm a complete hypocrite for having had my cake and eaten
it all those years ago, with age does come wisdom, fuddy-duddy though it
may be. Sadly, there can be no argument that recreational drug use among
the young cannot be stopped. However, as a father of two, I fail to see
that as an excuse to stop trying to stop it.

Furthermore, any implication that offering a so-called safe and legal
alternative to designer drugs - and both the safety and legality of Nemesis
are under scrutiny - is somehow doing a good deed for party-goers in
particular and society in general should be fought vigorously.

For starters, the law is an ass and should never be used as any indication
of moral right.

Secondly, no matter how safe and natural might be the components of
Nemesis, it is their effects which should be at issue. Thirdly, if the
effects do imitate those of the fair dinkum designer drugs, then surely the
dangers are just as fair dinkum and it is these which should inform any
consideration of legality, availability and distribution.

For whatever you take and how, stoned is stoned, drunk is drunk, out of
control is out of control.

And if you could ask Jimi, Jim or Janis, they'd tell you . . . dead is
dead. You don't need to be Einstein to know that death is the ultimate nemesis.