AS SOMEONE WHO DID DRUGS, I ONLY HOPE TESTING DOES NO HARM

There are no easy answers when confronting the human desire to take risks
and experiment with the forbidden, says Maggie Alderson.

Unlike Bill Clinton, I inhaled. And so did my entire peer group. A few
puffs here, a pill or two there, the odd bit of transcendental fungi, one
urban myth experiment with baked banana skins, an occasional sniff of a
solvent and enough grog to float the Titanic. That was growing up, middle
class, in a small English country town 25 years ago.

I survived it, minus a few million brain cells I sorely regret, but of that
1970s peer group, two are now dead from drug abuse. One from a heroin
overdose, aged 35, the other slipping away, when his 44-year-old body gave
out, Jim Morrison-style, after so many years of pick'n'mix substance abuse.

So would drug testing at their prestigious private schools have saved
Fergus* and Tom from their fates?

I don't think so. The problem with them both, I believe, was not so much
the drugs themselves, as why they carried on taking them, why they took
more of them and more often than the rest of us, who tried a taste of
something wicked and then moved on.

What was different about Fergus and Tom was the terrible relationships they
had with their over-achiever fathers. Both charismatic, hard-drinking men,
of giant personality and temper, racked by wartime experiences, who wanted
to impose their own definitions of manhood onto their sappy, long-haired,
never-known-a-hardship sons. They loved them, of course - almost too much -
and expressed it in anger. The result was war of another kind and both boys
ran towards dangers of their own creation in desperate attempts to prove
their masculinity to themselves. Competitive drinking and drug-taking
replaced their fathers' beloved rugby union (an old man's game in their
opinion) and their driving was as wildly self-destructive as their
drug-taking. Not as gruelling as dad's time on the Burma railroad, but 160
km/h on the wrong side of a narrow, twisting country road was a test of sorts.

So, no, I don't think school drug testing would have rescued the lost boys
who are present in every generation, because their parents wouldn't have
taken part in the necessary therapy - and I think they could have been
disastrous for generally "good kids" like myself . But those points aside,
I certainly do understand why parents and teachers are grasping at all
means possible to try to protect their children.

My own beloved nieces and nephews are now in that vulnerable age group,
where drug experimentation seems like a fast track to sophisticated
adulthood. The thought of those noxious substances entering the perfect
little bodies and brains I have loved so much fills me with horror.

It's a paradox I can't answer. Even though I did it all and survived - I
don't want them to do it. In fact, observing my friends and siblings trying
to damage-limit teenage rampages is the one thing that makes me glad I
don't have children of my own.

So what do you do when your children's idea of party fun suddenly has more
to do with pills and pot than pass-the-parcel?

My sister says talk to them and thinks a little bit of grass is better than
a lot of alcohol. I don't agree, because I know that Fergus first tried
heroin with the dealer he bought his pot from, but talking must be a good idea.

With the wisdom of 78 years and four adult children, my mother is more
philosophical, as she was when she caught my 16-year-old niece smoking.

"I did it, you did it, she's going to do it," she told me, but she still
thinks drug testing is a good idea. "All human cultures have stimulants of
some kind," she said. "I remember cocaine at parties in the 1940s. With
drug tests, at least you'd know what they were on."

Accept it as inevitable and stay friends with them, says a young friend,
not so long out of school himself. And educate them, I say, because a
first-year uni lecture about the effect of LSD on the brain did more to put
me off recreational drugs than anything else.

But perhaps above all, set a good example. Both my dead friends had
extravagantly alcoholic fathers and a couple of years ago the headmistress
of one high-profile Sydney school called the parents in and lectured
themabout drugs, because pupils had told her about cocaine-taking at their
middle-class professional parents' parties. "Your children have told me
what you do," she told them. "Stop it."

Perhaps parents should be drug tested too.

*Names have been changed.