KIDS WILL BE KIDS

That's Why Traditional Ways Of Fighting Drug Use Don't Work

I have had, shall we say, a colourful past. Have I got stories!

Like the time I filled a page with "I am so stoned" in my Grade 9
typing class instead of the assigned exercise. (I wasn't caught. I
threw up shortly afterward, the effects of too much smoke and too
little food. Trust me, no one wanted to go near my typewriter.)

Or the time I went to church still drunk from the night before and
passed out in the aisle. (No one noticed. It was a Pentecostal
church. People fall over all the time. It's called being "slain in
the spirit.")

Or the time a cop chased me across a soccer field in high heels and a
dress (me, not the cop) after seeing three of us smoking pot at the
goalposts. We were sent to the principal's office. I threw my stash
in his garbage can when he left to find the suspension forms. I don't
know what the janitor did with it.

I could go on. And I bet you wouldn't stop me. Because it's a good
read. A scandalous one too. (What's an ethics columnist doing dishing
details of her debauched debutante years? Trying saying that after
the fourth martini.)

You see what I just did? I entertained you for a minute. Maybe made you laugh.

And maybe I made it all up, just to have a story to tell. And that's
one reason why a 17-year-old girl like Nicole Malik, from a small
town, who'd only tried drugs once before, might do it again, despite
the risk, and wind up dead, probably from an overdose.

I don't know what Malik's last hours were like, or what her motives
were for anything she might have done.

But I was 17 once. And I had friends who were 17. And the prime
motivator for excessive, if not downright illegal, behaviour was to
answer that potentially mortifying Monday morning question: So what
did you do this weekend? Saying that you watched Friends with mom and
dad doesn't cut it.

Teenagers want to collect experiences, to live life to the fullest,
and to have lots of stories to tell. They want to be interesting
people with, well, colourful lives. Just like adults.

And that's why all the usual ways of combatting teen drug use won't work.

Like telling your kids they can't go to that bar, or that club,
because drugs might be present. Kids will sneak out. And you haven't
given them any protection for the temptations they might face.

Or like trying to scare your kids straight with stories of overdoses,
or car wrecks or date rapes, all because of drugs. Kids never believe
it will happen to them. (Neither do adults, for that matter.)

Or like trying to stigmatize drugs and their users. It will work for
a while. Crack and heroin are considered the loser's drugs - for now.
But there will always be a fashionable drug. Today it's Ecstasy -
what Malik reportedly took the night she died. It's a stimulant and a
hallucinogen, and it can be lethal. It has left 20 people dead in
Ontario since 1998.

What will work?

Prepare your kids. Tell them to buy their own drinks, watch them at
all times, and never accept anything from a stranger. They're less
likely to get a spiked beverage that way.

Educate them. Tell them what drugs do, how little it takes to get
high and how to use drugs safely. Like, say, alcohol. Don't have more
than one drink an hour if you want to stay standing. That type of
thing.

Respect your kids. They'll probably know more than you about drugs.
Pool your knowledge.

Provide alternatives - there are lots of drug-free ways to have a good time.

Be practical. If they insist on taking drugs, suggest a buddy system,
with a sober pal watching over them.

Share your own stories. It carries more credibility to say "I've been
there and I advise against it" than to say "Just say no."

This is what I hope I'll tell my kids when the time comes. Only they
will get to find out what the real stories are from my youth.