Drugs message ‘doing more harm than good’

PARENTS expressing extreme fears about widespread drug taking to their teenage children could be doing more harm than good.

Drug and Alcohol Research Training Australia director Paul Dillon said mums and dads who claimed drugs were everywhere and “everyone is doing drugs” are mistaken, and misinforming their children.

“It’s damaging for people, and especially kids, who don’t drink to excess or take drugs to start thinking something is wrong with them because they’re not behaving that way,” he said.

“Even though they are the norm, they can feel like an oddity because their parents, teachers and the media start to present this as a chronic, common, widespread problem when it really isn’t.”

Mr Dillon said most Australian children had never taken illicit drugs. The most recent Australian Secondary Students’ Alcohol and Drug survey found 96.9 per cent of students aged 12-17 had never used ecstasy, 98.1 per cent had never used cocaine, 98.5 per cent had never used opiates and 97.6 per cent had never used amphetamines.

In fact, more than 80 per cent of pupils in the 2014 survey had never used tranquillisers, cannabis, inhalants, hallucinogens or steroids.

“My experience is that, absolutely, there is drug and alcohol use but there’s also an awful lot of kids who are not doing it and we don’t tend to talk about them,” Mr Dillon said. “There are problems. There are terrible problems but there’s a real imbalance in the way this area is reported and talked about.”