LET'S ALL GROW UP, STOP PUSHING LIES AND HAVE AN HONEST DEBATE ABOUT DRUGS

What a disservice Andrew Johns has done to the kiddies of Australia.
How irresponsible to reveal years of drug use when he knows it is
official policy to scare people off drugs by making them believe
anyone who tries them ends up a derro.

At least he had the decency to speak of a struggle with depression.
Because we all know the only permissible way to talk about drug use
is to say it was a past mistake or the result of some kind of trauma
or mental illness.

When is this stupidity going to stop? When are we going to stop
dealing in hyperbole and trickery and have an adult debate about
drugs? A debate that is not dominated by what-will-the-kiddies-think
lies? My generation grew up with plenty of shocking warnings about
druggies and drug pushers and plenty of us take drugs because we know
those warnings were a complete crock.

The truth is that recreational drug taking is like mountaineering.
When all goes well, as it does most of the time, the experience can
be fun and even profound. Not only can the experience be great, it
can also give the adventurer insights into his or her own character
and the workings of the brain, insights that can be applied to the
rest of life. But drug taking, like mountaineering, can be dangerous.

Drug takers can develop addictions, scramble their brains and a small
minority will die. Mountaineers lose fingers and toes to frostbite.
Plenty die. They put the lives of rescuers at risk. When things do go
wrong, it always looks like an unnecessary risk in hindsight.
Families are destroyed. The difference between drug taking and
mountaineering is that no one tries to ban mountaineering. Most
crucially, no one would be despicable enough to try to make
mountaineering as unsafe as possible to discourage people from trying
it. No one would be cruel enough to try to increase the number of
mountaineering deaths by making safety equipment hard to come by, all
so they could say: "See, I told you so." Yet this is exactly the
policy that is applied to recreational drugs.

The illegality of drugs such as ecstasy means the quality and content
of a pill is unreliable. Pill testing kits are hard to come by when
they should be as freely available as free syringes. There is a real
generation gap on this topic. Older people who came of age before
drugs such as ecstasy were popular and freely available assume that
it is only deadbeats and troubled youngsters who are partaking
because all the normal people taking drugs keep quiet about it. If
only they knew the truth.

This generation gap has developed because my generation is too
gutless to stand up for the truth. Plenty of people my age take
recreational drugs occasionally. It tends to be a seasonal thing,
something saved up for New Year's Eve and dance parties over the summer.

As a generation, we passively accept that it is illegal. We passively
accept that occasionally someone we know will be caught and have
their career destroyed. We are willing to see friends get criminal
records, see girls such as the young dance teacher Annabel Catt die
because they mistakenly take strange substances passed off as
ecstasy. We see public figures who are caught have their reputations
besmirched and we say nothing.

No one is willing to stand up and admit to it because the risks are
so high. The risks are high precisely because so many recreational
drug users are leading normal lives with serious jobs that they don't
want to put at risk. They are not radicals. They have families they
don't want to embarrass.

This timidity is pretty inexcusable when you think of what people
have been willing to stand up for in the name of ending hypocrisy.
Think of activists in the 1970s who spoke out against laws banning
gay sex because honesty and principles counted. It is time to end the
lies and start having an honest debate about drugs.