DOING DRUGS WITH
PAUL DILLON

One of the questions I am most often asked by students, teachers and parents alike is why I got into this area and why I am so passionate about the topic. There are really two parts to the answer - the first, fairly boring and uninteresting and the second, deeply personal ...  The boring part is simply that I fell into it - there was no grand plan and I certainly never saw myself as ending up working in the alcohol and other drug field. Ask anyone I went to school (or teachers college or university) with  and they would say I was most probably the last person they would imagine would end up in that area. I trained as a primary school teacher, taught for a number of years and then left, moving through a number of jobs until finally ending up working at the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre (NDARC) at UNSW. Schools would occasionally call the Centre and ask for a researcher to give a presentation to students and, not surprisingly, no-one was interested. One day,...

Parents have it tough! In many ways, when it comes to parenting, you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't ... We constantly tell parents that they need to be involved in their child's life, to be interested in what they do, know their friends, where they're going and what they're doing, but at the same time we warn about the risk of 'overparenting'. This is a term used to describe a situation when parents are so protective of their children, so desperate for them to succeed in life, that they will do everything in their power to help them on their way and avoid anything potentially unpleasant. There have been a number of different types of overparenting identified over the past 20 years, with American media describing these over-zealous Mums and Dads as 'rescuers', 'white knights' 'snowplough' or 'bulldozer' parents and most recently 'lawnmower parents'. Interestingly, Scandinavian commentators have...

Hosting a party or gathering for teenagers is a huge responsibility. You want those attending to have fun but, at the same time, it is your responsibility to provide a safe environment for that to take place. Things can go wrong. It is important to consider all the possible risks and put things into place to ensure the safety of not only your guests and your family, but also your neighbours and the wider community. The greater the planning, the more likely it is that things will run smoothly.  The parties that are being put on by parents today are very different to those that many of us remember from our teens. Firstly, many of them are much larger events, with 60-80 teens on the invite list not being unusual (I can't personally see why any teen would ever need to have that many people but that's me - what do I know?). Secondly, where many of us only ever attended parties with people we knew well, today with the advent of the 'plus one' event, the mix of teens ar...

In Australia we know a great deal about the prevalence of drug use, particularly when compared to other countries in the world. The statistics that we have are often provided for particular states and territories, but you rarely see them broken down into greater detail than that. There are many reasons for this, but most importantly, the more detail given, the greater the chance of being able to identify who provided the information. This is particularly true of data on secondary school students' drug use. Even though people often request more detailed information on the drug use in a particular area, it is rarely, if ever, given as this could lead to a particular community being identified and result in the schools (or school) and their students in that area being labelled as having a 'drug problem'. That said, we do have enough information to suggest that there are certain areas where we are far more likely to see particular drug use than others. ...

Last weekend 22 people were hospitalized after overdosing at a dance event in Melbourne. According to a spokesperson for Ambulance Victoria, paramedics transported more than 30 people from a number of events across the city in that one evening, stating that it was it was "highest number of overdoses" they had seen "for some time". So what was the drug that caused all this chaos and is it a drug that parents should be overly concerned about? The drug was believed to be GHB or g amma-hydroxybutyrate.  This is certainly not a new drug and has been causing significant problems on the Australian dance/nightclub scene for over 20 years. The media rarely deals with drug stories particularly well, but this one they keep getting wrong and, as a result, there is a great deal of misinformation out there about the substance, what it is, how it is used and its harms. Some of the statements made in the media last weekend included the following: GHB is a new drug the...

I've raised this issue before in a previous blog entry but recently I spoke to a Year 10 girl who almost broke my heart, as a result, I thought it was timely to talk about it one more time. After my presentation, a wonderful young woman (let's call her Clare) approached me to tell me that she wasn't one of the 'cool' girls, she wasn't being invited to parties and she didn't think she ever would be. She didn't drink alcohol and had heard me say that I didn't - she wanted to know if I thought she would ever be accepted by those girls who did. Clare wanted to know if I had been invited to parties when I was a teen and did it ever get any better? As I said, heartbreaking ... Most of us remember that 'popular' group of girls at school that often made other girls' lives an absolute misery! This group usually regarded themselves as the prettiest, the smartest and the 'coolest', but in reality all they were were the meanest! With those ...

I've written many times about the importance of finding out as much as you can about an event your teen is invited to before you make a decision as to whether they can attend or not. To do that, you need to collect a range of information about what will be happening when your child gets there. One of the key questions that every parent needs to ask is around 'adult supervision'. Whether your child is going to their first sleepover, a small gathering on a Friday night at a friend's house or a 16th birthday extravaganza, it's important to find out whether adults will be there and what level of supervision will be taking place. What amazes me is that all parents expect their child's school to provide high quality adult supervision at all times - if this wasn't happening they would be up there pretty quickly to express their concern and demand that something be done. But when it comes to a Saturday night, this expectation of appropr...