DOING DRUGS WITH
PAUL DILLON

One young Australian aged between 14-17 years old dies every weekend due to alcohol. That figure astounds me each time I say it to a group of students but it truly is beginning to surprise me that we don't see far more deaths than that due to the increasing use of spirits by the very young. Recently I met a 16 year old girl at a school who wanted to thank me for the talk I had given her class the previous year. Only a couple of weeks after I had visited her school she had gone to a party and consumed almost a bottle of vodka with a couple of friends. She remembers little of the night apart from waking up in the hospital early the next morning with a drip in her arm and her parents sitting next to her, both of them in tears. Apparently she had lost consciousness and her friends had used some of the information I had given them in my talk to establish that she needed urgent medical assistance.   She was an amazing young woman. She had been through an unbelievably terrifying e...

Last weekend NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell made the front page of the Sun Herald on the issue of parents, parties and teenage binge drinking. The story begins by stating that "parents who supply alcohol to other people's children face up to 12 months jail" as part of the changes being pushed by the Premier. When you actually read the story it really says no such thing - no new laws have been made, just the ordering of a parliamentary inquiry into changes to the law to potentially prevent minors from drinking in homes, parks and halls. Call me just a little bit cynical but I wonder what the O'Farrell government didn't want on the front page last Sunday that led them to this big announcement of 'not much at all'! I remember many years ago when the then Premier of NSW, Bob Carr announced a trial of medical cannabis was to be rolled out, knowing full well that his government couldn't do anything without the Federal Government's support, guaranteei...