Well, I'm far from advocating the usage of drugs, but the myths are jsut as dangerous as the drugs themselves. In case of an emergancy, most people
will try and sort the problem themselves, and only as a last resort, call the authorities. By then, unfortunatley its often too late.
Take for example, the drug laws in the UK. A friend of mine completley lost the plot on extacy (I really need to look up the correct spelling for that
one
) and got arrested. He was caught with 9 pills on his person, and was arrested for possesion with intent to supply. The police simply couldn't
get their head round the fact that to a frequent user, this will easily see them through the weekend, possibly even the night. To them, 1 (and at a
push, 2) was personal consumption. That to me highlights the chasm of understanding between the authorities and the users.
When we did drug education at school (a good 8 years ago i believe, so things may have changed, so I may be wrong) and all the leaflets and info just
told us what the drug names were, and what they looked like. We were all young once, so we can all apreciate how little we take on board from people
in positions of authority. There's no mention of what to do if things go wrong, what can induce ill effects and what not, and as I said earlier,
there's things you can do which are very dangerous (drinking not enough water, drinking too much water, etc.) yet we were never made aware of these
things. The only info we had was word-of-mouth myths and what not.
Did u know that when coc aine and alcohol are mixed, they produce a 3rd drug inside ur brain, which comes with further issues as to what is dafe
and not safe to do under the influence? I can assure u we weren't taught this in any drug education talk at my school.
On a tangent, take sex education. Do u have any idea how many children in this country still believe things like "having sex standing up won't get u
pregnant" or "u can't get pregnant on ur first time"? With drugs, the myths have far more grave (and potentially terminal) consequences. After our
governments alleged crackdown on teen pregnancy (sex education taught at an earlier age, condoms and 'the pill' being freely handed out etc.) the
actual teen pregnancy rate has actually gone UP
This highlights the fact that prevention measures really don't make a massive difference at
all...
My point is, there needs to be help freely available to kids on this subject. No pamphlet is gonna make someone stop taking drugs, but the least we
can do is warn them of the dangers, but also advise them on the safe use of drugs. Dispel the myths, so to speak.
Actually, I've jsut done a googgle on the matter and there's a lot of helpful info on the BBC website (to namea few), so it looks like times have
changed, but this info is still far from common knowledge.