Andrew ‘Joey’ Johns triggered a mass of drug hysteria – front page articles at every turn – when he admitted using recreational drugs for the past decade. But last week, SMH columnist Lisa Pryor shot a bit of sense into the debate.
The debate treats Johns’s drug use as though it is performance-enhancing, or at least likely to seriously affect his game. That’s obviously not the case. Compared to the routine abuse of alcohol by footballers (including Johns), his recreational drug use is just a single note in an operatic epic of parties, brain damage and slurred mateship. But many of those weighing in the topic thrive on the same kind of macho drinking and recreational drug use. That’s why Lisa’s column, in which she indited herself (and her entire generation), was brave. But it also made some crucial points, and made them clearly enough for anyone to understand.
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.
The rest of Lisa’s column is here. It’s nice to see her writing about something she believes in for a change too; Lisa Pryor’s a great reporter, but all too often her columns feel like a ‘how will I fill those six columns this week’.
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