FDS Insight Newsletter Jul-Sep 2020

7 Talking to your kids Jeanette Kennett, Meanjin , vol. 61, no. 2 hilosopher Jeanette Kennett traces the family circumstances that have changed her views on drug policy Once upon a time I was almost as conservative and hardline about the evils of drug use as John Howard and his chief adviser on drug strategy, Brian Watters, could have wanted. But that was once upon a time when my children were still young and I still read to them and watched them play basketball and netball on Saturdays and football on cold muddy Sundays, and drove them to their pottery classes and music lessons. Zero tolerance made sense in our small world, a world where I controlled the borders, a world where I knew what was best for them. But our world grew larger and so did the children. Our experiences together have shaped my views as much as I have shaped theirs. That is how it should be, though it was not easy to let it be. I thought back to those early times as I watched the federal- government- sponsored series of advertisements depicting families and young lives destroyed by drug use – heroin use, of course, though that is not an especially popular drug. I found the advertisements unexpectedly affecting. In many ways they rang true. They showed that these things – drug-related arguments, crimes, death, grief, turmoil and bewilderment – do happen. Even in nice middle-class homes like mine and yours, to well-loved, ordinary, happy kids with seemingly bright, open futures. What did not ring true in this campaign was the analysis of and the solution to the problem presented. The implied analysis, given the innocent beginnings of these stories, is that it is drug use simpliciter that is to blame for the depicted slide into degradation: teenagers thieving, prostituting themselves, behaving violently, ending up on the streets, in the lock-up, in the morgue. By this interpretation, drug use is not just potentially damaging to one’s health, it is corrupting; that is what justifies and indeed morally requires that we get ‘tough on drugs’. That is why drug use is properly a criminal offence. This message is made even clearer in the government pamphlet that accompanied the television campaign. In highlighting the scheme that allows drug users to be diverted into compulsory assessment, it says: ‘If users want to be free of the criminal justice they have a personal responsibility to work to be free of drugs’. The scheme is not available to ‘persistent offenders’ (that is, those whose problems are more serious and intractable). They will be dealt with in the criminal justice system. Drug use is so seriously immoral that those who persist in such immorality deserve severe sanctions. P