FDS Insight Newsletter Jul-Sep 2020

9 having ‘mad fun’ and appear to be unscathed by their experiences. Who are you going to believe about what certain drugs do? The reluctance of many teenagers to talk to their parents about drug use is a bad thing. It’s especially bad because if they do have an adverse reaction to something they try, their parents are likely to be the last people to know, and their children and those they are with may be too afraid to seek help at all. Anna Wood, the Sydney teenager who died at the age of fifteen after taking ecstasy, was plainly very ill for around five hours before her parents and an ambulance were called. ‘We weren’t scared for ourselves,’ one of her friends said, ‘we were very scared for Anna. We knew that if Anna’s mum found out what she’d been doing she would never let us see Anna again. I do not know if the outcome would have been any different for Anna and her family if she and her friends had not been afraid to seek help earlier. I do know that I don’t want my daughter, my sons and their friends to be too scared to contact me. But to get that kind of trust, I need to have a real conversation with them. Like all conversations, one about drugs may stray down unexpected paths. After all, it is not and should not be just my conversation – it is not a meeting that I run to a strict agenda with predetermined, government-approved outcomes for the items listed for ‘discussion’. None of my conversations with my children go like that; they are quick to spot an agenda, and when I try to predetermine the outcomes, a conversation turns very quickly into a face-off. We are talking about what it is like to talk to real teenagers. They don’t come out of wholesome Father Knows Best sitcoms; they have minds and agendas of their own, and adolescent propensities for storming off, slamming doors, sullenness, scorn and rebellion are only aggravated by Father Knows Best attitudes. A real conversation about drugs must move beyond prohibition, beyond scare-mongering, beyond laying down ‘clear boundaries’, beyond implacable opposition to what very large numbers of teenagers are doing, opposition or no[t]. Otherwise, sullenness, resistance and deception are what we will get and what we will deserve. We need to listen as well as talk, for we have things to learn too. And what I have learned over eight long years of issuing diktats, of failed attempts to secure the borders, of remonstrating, arguing, talking and listening, is that my opinions and concerns, though noted, and mostly understood and respected, are not the final arbiter of their actions. And so I’ve come to the conclusion that I must talk to my children not just about the dangers of drugs use but also about safer drug use, about what they can do to minimise the risk of experimentation and about getting help quickly if things go wrong. But, of course, government policy doesn’t envisage us having that kind of conversation, because the very purpose or the conversations is supposed to be to drug-proof our children – to prevent experimentation. Tell them how dangerous it is and the thought is they won’t do it. This is pie in the sky. Since when were teenagers deterred from trying