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Published: 26 April 2022

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Snowflakes, easily triggered or unfairly maligned, the worsening mental health of young people became a sensitive topic during the pandemic lockdowns. In the battles over safety, children became a political football tossed about in debates about re-opening.

However, the Covid-19 pandemic did not cause these issues, but rather revealed and accelerated them.

Self-harm and anxiety disorders among adolescents have already been increasing across the Western world. Just as the pandemic was speeding up historical trends such as digitisation, the statistical rise in youth self-harm, eating disorders and substance abuse was ­already occurring.

The combination of smartphones and social media is often raised as a key factor, unique to upcoming generations.

The history of consumerism is a greater sophistication of co-­opting our primitive psychology towards the usage of goods and services. Fatty food, internet pornography and illicit drugs all prosper from sparking the same neural pleasure pathways. Social media and technology take this to another level by exploiting our insecurities about status, connection and belonging in a hierarchy.

This puts a greater premium on skills previously known as character like a willingness to delay gratification, something which may have been a puritanical norm for our parents but is increasingly lacking for many of our children.

The most effective period for investments in both cognitive and non-cognitive skills are the early years. Nobel laureate and economist James Heckman argues it is when we are the most malleable, flexible and able to be imprinted by parents and culture.

Children used to be useful but are now protected. Before they were teenagers they worked the fields, helped in mills or cared for their siblings. From the moment of birth, people were enmeshed in a complex web of obligations. Now the primary role of parents is to cultivate their children. As Jennifer Senior outlines in her book All Joy And No Fun, no longer are parents custodians of old traditions but are instead required to invent new ones.

Educational psychologist Donna Cross of the University of Western Australia argues that as other sites of community and character formation have declined, schools have acquired more pressures to rectify the fragmentation. Teachers become unofficial parents of children from broken families, especially in lower socio-economic areas. There is a greater therapeutic focus in schools.

In lower socio-economic groups, emotional disturbance may be expressed, especially among boys, through bad behaviour, whereas among the middle classes neuroses is more common. The greater medicalisation of middle-class distress, which adds greater legitimacy and even privileges through disability provisions, is widening the education and character divide.

This is a pointer that the potential decline in character traits is also growing among the wealthy, evidence that affluence can undercut discipline.

An especially important aspect in discussing youth mental health is the paucity in idioms of suffering. Young people have fewer myths to set context to adversity. This may also explain the huge popularity of Harry Potter, a set of stories that is now arguably competitive to the Bible as a sacred text for upcoming generations.

An aspect of psychologist Jordan Peterson’s success is his ability to articulately communicate Biblical stories and Jungian concepts such as universal archetypes. Jung teaches that meaning in life comes not just in “love and work”, as Freud said, but is made intelligible through recurring cultural patterns, namely myths.

We live in times of great prosperity but can lack purpose. There can be a sterility to modern life as we accumulate ever larger amounts of wealth. A sense of the sacred is largely snuffed out, as is the place of ritual which connects us to groups or spirituality. Traditional religions have become vestiges of the past. We are not sure how to revive ancient traditions for a modern polyglot world. The revival of Anzac Day, driven in large part by young people, is evidence of a yearning for such ritual and shared stories.

It was Martin Seligman who said that “poverty is a state of present mindedness”. Overcoming the loss of self-reliance requires ending the dependency feedback loop of a society which encourages safetyism, gratification from the smartphone and the avoidance of all risk. This has the effect of creating psychological fragility and an inability to deal with the vagaries of life, which creates demand for even more protections.

The development of such skills, which may have once been called character, is arguably the central task of any civilised society.

The non-cognitive skills of character – particularly of persistence, prudence and the deferral of gratification – are being undermined. In combination with a lesser capacity to make sense of suffering and adversity, future generations are ill-equipped to cope with the avalanche of instant gratification vehicles that are now perpetually accessible.

For complete article (The Australian 24/4/22)

Also see “Drug Policy: Building or Demolishing Community Resilience?”

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Published: 20 April 2022

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Psychedelics: The New Panacea – Just Like Cannabis, it will Fix Everything, Won’t it?

Everything you need to know about psychedelics and mental illness

The science of psychedelics is everywhere – but we should treat it with serious scepticism

Research is me-search

It’s the same for psychedelics. This is just an anecdotal account, but there’s an interview with the psychedelics researcher Manoj Doss, who says that he “only know[s] one psychedelic researcher who’s never done psychedelics”, and notes (in an encouragingly self-critical way) that this is a conflict of interest. He’s right! Just as you’d feel extra-sceptical if all the research showing that pork is unhealthy was written by Muslims who’d already decided for religious reasons not to eat pork, you should be worried about the sheer number of studies by psychedelic researchers who are themselves aficionados of the drugs.

(You might wonder if they’re into psychedelics precisely because the research shows such impressive benefits, switching around cause and effect. But as we’ll see below, that evidence doesn’t exist yet. That particular horse is coming way after the cart).

This isn’t just the view of one researcher. Reading the literature on psychedelics, you continually encounter concerns about the “over-exuberance” of some scientific advocates of the drugs. There are also discussions of conflicts of the financial kind: we know that there are a lot of psychedelic-drug companies springing up all over the place, and we know they pay consultation fees to psychedelics researchers because these are disclosed in research papers (see e.g. the section near the end of this paper, which we’ll discuss in more detail below).

There are all kinds of problems—from outright publication bias to more subtle “questionable research practices”—that can creep in when researchers have a conscious or unconscious bias in one particular direction. It doesn’t take much to push the statistical results in a field towards unreliability and false-positivedom. One 2020 paper suggests methods, many of them from Open Science, that psychedelics researchers should consider using to try and reduce these biases. I doubt many papers on psychedelics use them already.

Yikes. He even lists the papers he’s reviewed on his website, so we can have some idea of which ones we might wish to be extra-sceptical about (Sessa has also been criticised on social media for a graph he made that, without clearly informing the reader, combines the results of two studies as if they were one).

But even if the specific scientist running a psychedelics trial isn’t themselves a “psychonaut”, there’s still the more mundane kind of bias, a bias that almost all scientists have: towards finding positive, cool, encouraging, exciting results (as opposed to null, shrug-inducing, disappointing, boring ones).

Here’s an example – and it happens to concern one of the most important psychedelic trials yet performed. In April 2021 the psychedelics researcher Robin Carhart-Harris (now at UC San Francisco; back then at Imperial College London where he still has an affiliation) wrote an article in The Guardian entitled “Psychedelics are transforming the way we understand depression and its treatment”. It was part of the publicity for a new randomised controlled trial (RCT) he’d co-authored, which had just been published in the world’s top medical journal, the New England Journal of Medicine. 

The psychedelic in question was psilocybin, the main active ingredient from magic mushrooms. Before we get to the 2021 trial, it’s worth backtracking slightly to look at what evidence on psilocybin and depression existed beforehand. Here are the trials:

• A “pilot study” from 2011 of psilocybin in advanced-stage cancer, including 12 patients, which found no statistically significant results on depression measures;
• A “feasibility study” in 2016. This had 12 patients and no control group, so can only really be used to, as the authors put it, “motivate further trials”;
• A double-blind RCT from 2016 in 51 patients with life-threatening cancer which found that psilocybin had very positive effects on mood that lasted for up to 6 months;
• Another double-blind RCT, also from 2016, in 29 patients with life-threatening cancer that again found beneficial effects on depression symptoms over 6 months;
• A final RCT from 2020, in 27 patients with major depression (of whom 24 actually finished the study) that found “large, rapid, and sustained antidepressant effects” over 8 weeks.

So, pretty tiny studies; some of them in very specific populations. The 2021 NEJM study was the first—and remains the only—study to compare psilocybin to an established, commonly-prescribed antidepressant drug – in this case the SSRI drug escitalopram. As with all the above, it was very small (59 people), but the comparison it looked at was a big deal. That’s because it’s not enough to show the psychedelic drug is better than placebo – after all, we already have treatments for depression. We need to know how it compares to those pre-existing treatments. 

The harm

Anyone who’s interested in psychedelics and mental illness should listen to the New York Magazine podcast series “Cover Story: Power Trip”. Among several other stories, the podcast reports investigative work around clinical trials of MDMA (ecstasy) therapy for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, run by an organisation called the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS. 

The crucial thing here is that it’s not just MDMA: it’s MDMA plus therapy (by the way, MDMA is only sometimes classified as a “psychedelic drug”, depending on who you talk to; but MDMA therapy is almost always classed as “psychedelic therapy”, since some of the effects overlap with drugs that are definitely psychedelics). And as described in the podcast, that therapy can get very weird.

The danger is that psychedelics can make users pliant and suggestible, leading to obvious dangers if a patient is left in the hands of anyone with less-than-noble intentions (there’s a reason so many cults over the years have used psychedelics–including MDMA–to help keep their members compliant). The podcast relates the story of Meaghan Buisson, a PTSD sufferer who underwent intense MDMA therapy with two therapists in a MAPS trial. The therapy was filmed in its entirety – and it’s grim. If you can stomach it, you should watch the video, which was uncovered in the NY Magazine investigation. But if you can’t, here’s a description:

“The therapists, Richard Yensen and Donna Dryer, guide Buisson through three long sessions with follow-ups in between. They give her the drugs and, as she recalls, coax her to relive her sexual assaults. They ask her to spread her legs, and at several points, they lie on top of her and pin her down, sometimes holding her wrists. The two then comfort Buisson by stroking her face and climbing into bed with her. There are periods in the video when Yensen is in constant physical contact with her.”

At other points, Yensen and Dryer blindfold Buisson, gag her with a towel, and ignore her as she screams at them to get off her. Yensen also “admitted to having sex with Buisson after the experimental sessions ended but while she was still enrolled in the clinical trial”. This is a far cry from the friendly, comfortable, hand-holding sessions you see in photos from other MDMA (and psilocybin) therapy sessions. MAPS has said that Yensen and Dryer did not stick to their therapy protocol and that they won’t be working with them again. 

Rick Doblin, Executive Director of MAPS—who, incidentally, has argued that psychedelic therapy could have prevented the War in Iraq and will produce a “spiritualised humanity” by 2070, and who encourages his employees to smoke marijuana while doing certain tasks at work—was asked about the potential for sexual abuse by therapists in a recent Q&A session. He had this to say:

“We’re trying to make it so that the source of the healing is inside the patient… that will hopefully make them stronger when there is, um, y’know, pressure perhaps from therapists to, y’know, engage in a sexual relationship.”

Perhaps not ideal.

Hopefully this article has convinced you that there are a lot of red flags in the psychedelic scientific literature, and that you should perhaps set your standards higher than usual when reading about this area. To summarise everything I’ve said, we should bear the following in mind:

1. The reasons people are so excited about psychedelics for mental illness are not necessarily related to how much evidence there is for the treatment;
2. The conflicts of interest in the psychedelic research field go very deep. It’s completely plausible that these conflicts help bias the studies toward reporting more positive results than are actually true;
3. The discussion of psychedelic research in the media often bears only a passing resemblance to what’s actually in the trials – or at least it sounds a lot more certain and optimistic than is warranted;
4. Even the best-quality trials are flawed in important ways because—mainly due to problems of expectations and blinding—this is an incredibly difficult thing to study;
5. We shouldn’t allow our excitement for psychedelic drug trials to run roughshod over safety concerns, and we shouldn’t be so desperate for a breakthrough mental health treatment that we roll out these drugs before we’ve tested whether they work in high-quality, smartly-designed studies.

We’re nowhere near reaching peak interest in psychedelics. With all the scientific research programmes, and all the companies vying with each other to create the bestselling psychedelic product, maybe there’s a chance some of the above uncertainties will be ironed out in the coming years. 

On the other hand, researchers might just continue doing low-quality, hard-to-interpret studies that back up their pre-existing beliefs, giving false hope to sufferers of mental illness. You don’t exactly have to be tripping to imagine that.

By Stuart Ritchie 15^th April 2022

 For complete article

Further Reading

• The Ethical Implications of Psychedelics
• Blinding and expectancy confounds in psychedelic randomized controlled trials: Expert Review of Clinical Pharmacology: Vol 14, No 9
• The problem at the heart of modern psychedelic clinical research
• Taking the ‘Novel’ Out of New Psychoactive Substances

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Published: 08 April 2022

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Protective Factor Number One in Drug Use Prevention Science: In Denying or Delaying Uptake of Substances the Key Protective Factor for Your Children/Students is the “Belief that Drug are Bad”

Latest research out of University of Illinois, and not before time, has published what has been intuitively known for decades – That is that the key, and it would appear overarching, protective factor against substance use uptake is the ‘Belief that drug use is wrong’. (Also, parental reinforcement of this belief, along with honest caring and proactive parenting of the child as the other bookend of this primary protective factor)

The researchers found individual beliefs that drug use is wrong had twice the magnitude of impact compared to other risk and protective factors examined in the study. Thus, influencing adolescents' beliefs about drug use may be an important but relatively underemphasized key to modifying their behavior.

The researchers analyzed information from the 2018 Illinois Youth Survey, which measured risk behaviors among middle and high school students. The study included more than 128,000 youths in grades 8, 10, and 12 from schools across Illinois. Respondents noted whether and how frequently they had used alcohol, cannabis or tobacco in the past year. They also answered a range of questions about their attitudes, school, family and health.

"It is not surprising that drug use beliefs are linked to behavior; we certainly would expect a correlation between them. What's most noticeable is the magnitude of the effect, particularly in comparison to more established factors included in the analyses," Barton states.

In the survey, youth were asked how wrong they think it is for someone their age to consume alcohol or drugs, ranking from "not wrong at all" to "very wrong" on a four-point scale. For each unit increase in response, the likelihood of past-year drug abstinence increased by 39% for 8th graders, 50% for 10th graders, and 53% for 12th graders.

Beliefs not only correlated strongly with past usage, but also with frequency of use.

"Even among individuals who used drugs in the past year, individual beliefs that drug use is wrong were associated with less frequent use," Barton says.¹

The Dalgarno Institute and other primary prevention, demand reduction and community resilience building educators, have been fully aware of this issue for many years and have challenged some of the confusing narratives coming out about drug education priorities which lean toward normalizing or even sanitizing drug use as, ‘part of growing up’!

It is concerning for all communities and their families that pro-drug advocates have been working tirelessly to hijack our very important National Drug Strategy and create the very ‘cognitive dissonance’ we are seeing in many AOD education offerings. 

What is even more concerning however, is the outcome (whether intended or not) of sending a strong tacit message to our young people that drug use is somehow ‘normal’ or at least, a phase of experimentation that is normal. Messages that clearly undercut this primary prevention vehicle of drug use being wrong, The reason for this undercutting appear varied and also concerning.

Consequently, the emerging generation are being primed by this ‘messaging’ along with an increasingly consistent indifference to adolescent drug use that either ignores best practice of prevention, demand reduction and abstinence or worse; actively mocks these positions as unsophisticated or sub-culturally ‘uncool’. Subsequently this all creates the self-fulfilling predictor that kids are being primed to hear, and that is… ‘drug use is normal, a little risky, but manageable’, because some of the ‘grown ups’ are telling me it is!

Add to that, the following tactics

• Socio-behavioural undermining drivers such as couching some psychotropic toxins in a ‘medicinal’ context – thus feigning a type of legitimacy for ‘recreational’ engagement. e.g. cannabis and psychedelics.
• The ongoing misuse of legitimate de-stigmatizing vehicles, not to assist those caught in substance use, but more cynically to defend those who willing use substances for ‘recreational’ purposes.
• The touting of the damage management model of harm reduction (not prevention) as the preferred emphasis in AOD education.
• Not to mention the decriminalisation agendas that all scream at the emerging adult, (all-be-it sub-textually) that ‘drug use can’t be all that bad!’

It is important for us all to understand these advocacies and the associated conduct in the public square is all an in-kind drug ‘education’, and the pro-drug lobby knows this.

Our Children/Students have as their actual ‘Human Right’ under Article 33 Convention the Rights of the Child to be protected from all aspects of illicit drug use – all aspects. Any vehicle of mechanism that undermines or interferes with that authentic human right is at best incredibly concerning, at worst utterly egregious.

It is time that all teaching/learning environments hadDemand Reduction and Primary Prevention at the centre of all AOD education – as we do with Tobacco.

There is Only one message, one voice and one focus in the marketplace and that is Don’t Uptake or QUIT. There is no dissenting, contrary or confusing voices in any public sectors of education, medical and government policy on Tobacco, so why are we permitting this confusion in the illicit drug space?

It's time we had a ‘war for the brains, health and future’ of the emerging generation, and stop pandering to a cultural minority who continue to expend extraordinary amounts of social, intellectual, and financial capital on trying to convince the culture that drug use and the outcome of ‘getting high’ or ‘having fun’ is not only manageable, but important.

The usefulness of lived experience of the Recovering Alumni – The ex-drug user – in understanding this key protective factor cannot be understated.

Key questions that must be answered,

1. What is best practice around AOD (alcohol & other drug) use for the developing brain – Prevention of damage management?
2. What ‘drug education’ are your children/students being subject too?
3. Why, as educators, would we permit any cognitive dissonance in our teaching/learning environments in the AOD education space?

It’s time to #preventdontpromote and work tirelessly in promoting #demandreduction

Also see

1. Drug Policy: Prevent, don't promote. Part 3, Changing language: Control Language, Control Culture (What Drug Education are Your Kids Getting? Cognitive Dissonance Theory)  Drug Policy: Prevent, don't promote. Part 3, Changing language: Control Language, Control Culture - YouTube  Drug Policy: Prevent, don't promote. Part 3, Changing language: Control Language, Control Culture - YouTube
2. Drug Policy: Prevent, don't promote. Part 2, What's in Play? Controlling language

Education Team @ Dalgarno Institute

 

Drug use beliefs found to be strongest predictor of youth substance use

by Marianne Stein, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

What are the most important factors to consider for developing effective drug use prevention programs? Many current programs for adolescents focus on elements including peer and family relationships, school connection, and youth's self-confidence and self-assertion. However, a new study from the University of Illinois (U of I) suggests another factor may be equally—or even more—influential: whether the youth believes drug use is wrong.

"Inherent to the success of drug use prevention programs is ensuring activities are targeting those risks and protective factors that are most influential and salient for youth substance use," says Allen Barton, assistant professor and Extension specialist in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at U of I and lead author on the study.

"As we aim to develop more effective drug use prevention programming, we have to ask whether any pertinent factors have been overlooked."

Barton and his colleagues found individual beliefs that drug use is wrong had twice the magnitude of impact compared to other risk and protective factors examined in the study. Thus, influencing adolescents' beliefs about drug use may be an important but relatively underemphasized key to modifying their behavior.

The researchers based their work on cognitive dissonance theory, which has not been used commonly to inform drug prevention efforts.

"The basic idea of cognitive dissonance theory is that individuals strive for harmony or agreement between their beliefs and their behavior. When there's a disconnect or dissonance, they try to reconcile either by changing their behavior to match their beliefs, or by changing their beliefs to allow for their behavior," Barton explains.

The researchers analyzed information from the 2018 Illinois Youth Survey, which measured risk behaviors among middle and high school students. The study included more than 128,000 youths in grades 8, 10, and 12 from schools across Illinois. Respondents noted whether and how frequently they had used alcohol, cannabis or tobacco in the past year. They also answered a range of questions about their attitudes, school, family and health.

"It is not surprising that drug use beliefs are linked to behavior; we certainly would expect a correlation between them. What's most noticeable is the magnitude of the effect, particularly in comparison to more established factors included in the analyses," Barton states.

In the survey, youth were asked how wrong they think it is for someone their age to consume alcohol or drugs, ranking from "not wrong at all" to "very wrong" on a four-point scale. For each unit increase in response, the likelihood of past-year drug abstinence increased by 39% for 8th graders, 50% for 10th graders, and 53% for 12th graders.

Beliefs not only correlated strongly with past usage, but also with frequency of use.

"Even among individuals who used drugs in the past year, individual beliefs that drug use is wrong were associated with less frequent use," Barton says.

The researchers found parents' beliefs also had a protective effect, albeit smaller than individual beliefs, while peer acceptance of drug usage was a risk factor. Perhaps more surprisingly, parental communication about drugs was associated with higher usage.

"These conversations may be happening because parents are already suspicious that youth are using drugs or trying to experiment," Barton notes. He suggests parents might want to speak with their kids about drugs at an earlier age, perhaps during the middle school years, rather than wait until they perceive a problem.

The study's findings can inform research and prevention efforts in various ways, the scientists say. First steps are to investigate how youths' beliefs about drug use are formed and influenced. Practitioners might also consider how they can support parents and caregivers in transmitting their beliefs to youth.

"Our work suggests this is a construct that warrants more attention in both the research and practice communities as it demonstrates a strong protective effect when it comes to drug use," Barton says. "As we are trying to improve drug use prevention programming for youth, these results suggest it may be useful to think about how educators, mentors, and parents can help instill the belief that drug use is wrong."

For complete article

RESEARCH: Adolescent Substance Use and Individual Beliefs That Drug Use Is Wrong: A State-wide Epidemiological Study

Pages 640-648 | Published online: 10 Feb 2022

Abstract

Objective: Informed by cognitive dissonance theory, the current study investigated the ability of youths’ belief that drug use is wrong to predict likelihood of past year substance use abstinence as well as frequency of use at grades 8, 10, and 12.

Method: Study analyses were executed from a statewide epidemiological survey of more than 125,000 youth using multi-group Zero-Inflated Poisson regression modeling.

Results: Personal belief that drug use is wrong demonstrated the largest magnitude of effect at each grade among the individual, family, and school-based factors under examination; this finding emerged with respect to predicting past year substance use abstinence as well as rates of substance use among individuals reporting past year use. Although differences across grades were evident for the magnitude of effect within various risk and protective factors, the rank ordering in magnitude of effect between factors was consistent across grades 8, 10, and 12.

Conclusion: Current results underscore the salience of youths’ belief that drug use is wrong in explaining likelihood of past year substance use at multiple time points during adolescence.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10826084.2022.2034877?journalCode=isum20

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Published: 01 October 2021

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The phenomenon of semantic contagion is a fascinating one, and it is has been used relentlessly in propaganda measures to recalibrate thinking around fixed ideas in all sorts of arenas.

A brief (and one aspect) take on this is, a process of reframing a word, term, phrase or principle for purposes of harnessing it for another focus, other than it’s intended specificity. It is often not necessarily a blatant misuse of the term, rather a re-tasking to suit an agenda not originally meant for the term.

Harm Reduction is just such a term that has been so engaged and recalibrated over recent years.

This important Pillar of the National Drug Strategy was set in place in an attempt to reduce the burden of disease, disorder and/or death of those caught in the tyranny of drug addiction, whilst simultaneously assisting them to exit the drug use that is causing said dysfunctional states.

A useful meme employed by many proponents of this framework is, ‘You cannot rehabilitate a dead drug user.’ Again, a useful linguistic tool for a semantic contagion strategy, because whilst it is true, and using absolute and dramatic terms like ‘death’, lends a certain urgency (as it should), that is not the final agenda of the pro-drug advocate.

Of course, no Harm Reductionist who hates drugs and wants drug users off these life diminishing toxins wants a user to die. However, the pro-drug use proponent will hide behind the hijacked nomenclature of ‘preventing death’ (only one of many other life destroying harms of drug use), not for the purpose of exiting drug use and develop full humanity, instead it is to continue drug use whilst managing as many ‘harms to the high’ that can be mustered.

Again, the important Harm Reduction platform was set up to assist those current drug users, reduce the activity that is causing harm, not just the ‘harm’ of the self-destructive activity they are now – if dependant – trapped in. The intent of this was always, reduce use, reduce harm, and exit drug use.

However, this well-meaning platform, when employed by those who not only want to, by deliberate design, move into illicit drug use, but endeavour to normalize their ‘recreational’ choices, have – used semantic contagion – (among other strategies) to give their agenda some traction.

Nowhere is this more evident that with Pill Checking program promotion.

You will note there have been zero harmful incidents over the consumption of illicit substances at any music festivals for around 18 months. This is confirming at least one fact, that these events are a contagion in and of themselves for the potential of the Non-Communicable Drug Disease (NCD) of substance use. These events heighten and do not diminish both the exposure and susceptibility factors in aetiology that exacerbates this NCD.

That aside, the well-meaning agenda of the genuine Harm Reductionist, may be to

1. Minimise adulterants to the illicit psychotropic toxin being courted
2. Even advise of the risks of ‘uncut’ pure illicit psychotropic toxins

It is the more potent and tangible messaging of such a (if permitted by law) mechanism that undermines the other two priority pillars of the National Drug Strategy – Demand and Supply Reduction.  This vehicle tacitly affirms the act of seeking out a ‘party enhancement’ substance – undermining Demand Reduction. This demand consequently only adds to the supply driver – undermining Supply Reduction. Both actively undermining these priority pillars of the National Drug Strategy.

You do not ‘extinct’ a behaviour by endorsing, equipping and enabling it. However, that no longer seems to be a focus with illicit drug use by a small, but noisy cohort. Yet in the same National Drug Strategy, the cessation focus is the only model for tobacco, and with remarkable success.

So, why is this actively avoided in the illicit drug use space? We’ll let you investigate this incongruence at your leisure. 

Those permission models, particularly for punters who wants to experiment, is a green light hard to resist, especially when ‘nestled in’ among other contagions, such as peer pressure, ‘psycho-naut’ propaganda and the parochial permission of this now ‘drug law free’ arena called a Music Festival.

All of this does not eliminate the risk of drug use harm – even of the now ‘checked and permitted’ variety, if for no other reason than illicit substances are toxins and unpredictably idiosyncratic in nature and impact. 

Death, whilst a drastic and instantly permanent outcome of substance use is tragic, there are other harms that can be incurred, some of which are also not only debilitating, but can be permanent; and ‘endorsement’ mechanisms that permit activities that can facilitate those harms is not good public health practice.

Governments of civil society are supposed to provide safe, healthy and productive environments for their citizens. Environments that are protective, not mere ‘risk mitigating’ spaces.

Whilst some citizens may seek to live counter to such priorities and expect to create a culture that not only undermines best health and well-being practice, but extol its ‘virtues’, they still continue to look to the same government for assistance when things go ‘pear shaped’. Often with a view to maximize their well-being whilst choosing to remain in a drug use – and a consequently self-harming – context.

Legislatively endorsed pill-checking is incongruent with best-practice health strategies and clearly current illicit drug laws. The simple mantra, ‘they’re gunna do it anyway’ has never been a credible precedent for best practice strategies, at least in an ethically focused civil society.

It is important that all the semantic texts and subtexts are investigated.

For further reading.

• Pill Checking & the National Drug Strategyow About Ecstasy Deaths
• Pill Testing: Russian Roulette as Drug Policy?
• What Every Australian Young Person Needs to Know About Ecstasy Deaths
• Why Drug Testing is a Bitter Pill to Swallow – QC Perspective
• Scoring the Pill Test

The Communications Team – Dalgarno Institute