TOLERANCE NEEDED: DRUGS EXPERT

MELBOURNE: Portraying young people as delinquents and locking them up
for experimenting with drugs was naive, a drugs expert told an
international conference yesterday.

Most young people who tried drugs did not continue using them or
develop significant problems, the first International Conference on
Drugs and Young People was told in Melbourne.

Young people usually experimented and used drugs sporadically before
stopping altogether, Macquarie University director of Clinical Drug
Dependence Studies John Howard said.

"Being told that 'drugs ruin your life' is clearly a contradictory
message when young people see ex-users alive, coping and recovering,"
he said.

Dr Howard said young people were going to take drugs because it was a
part of their reality, and families and communities had to learn to
deal with it.

"We really don't value our young people in Australia very much at
all," he said.

"I think we need to see them as something that needs to be controlled,
or potential delinquents or these nasty people that need to be kept in
these holding patterns called schools and then kept in the
social-security system until they are 25.

"When on Earth are we going to allow people to grow up and be young
and to have some of the fun of being young and some of the risks that
go with that?

"I'm not saying that it should be encouraged; I'm saying it is there
and the knowledge that it is there and that people will experiment and
that if we love our kids enough to be able to talk to us about what's
going on rather than have to hide."

Dr Howard also slammed what he called a vigilante-style reaction to
drugs in the community in Australia.

"An event occurs - a pretty young girl dies, falls down dead somewhere
- - and all of a sudden parents become media stars rather than
necessarily parents grieving and we end up with a situation that flows
on out of control," he said.

A lot of misinformation and myth was often spread in such cases,
resulting in an over-reaction.

"Curfews and so on, these things that position young people as
dangerous, as idiots, as people who need to be locked up and
manipulated and kept safe because the world is so wicked - they're
naive approaches that don't work."

Drug treatment, which did not always work, had to be designed to suit
young people, some of whom suffered nothing more than "an acute case
of adolescence" and did not need to be put into a drug treatment
program if they used drugs, he said.

Checked-by: Patrick Henry