DOING DRUGS WITH
PAUL DILLON

Drinking in parks, bushland and on beaches is nothing new. Teens have been doing it for generations. Finding a place to experiment with alcohol, away from the watchful eyes of parents, has always set challenges for adolescents but 'where there's a will there's a way'.  For many parents of today their first alcohol experience was likely to have involved a group of friends in a local park on a Saturday night. Although some may remember the thrill of being part of this 'adult experience' for the first time, most do not necessarily have fond memories of the evening. The setting was not the best and was likely to have been dark and uncomfortable, there was the constant fear of getting caught and what was being consumed was usually something cheap and nasty. The memory of this first experience could be one of the major reasons that some parents make the decision to provide alcohol to their teen to take to a party. They remember the very real dangers they faced that ni...

Regular readers of my blog would know that I have been involved in a number of alcohol-related deaths over the years. Sadly, most of these are usually are young women around the age of 15 and almost all of them have involved vodka. Very few of these deaths received any media attention, with the parents involved understandably reluctant to come forward and speak about their loss.  Unfortunately, many parents are totally unaware of the popularity of vodka amongst teens until they host a party themselves and start the big 'clean-up' the next morning, only to find empty bottles of the stuff littering their garden or hidden in various nooks and crannies around the place. So many Mums and Dads have told me that they didn't really grasp the extent of vodka consumption amongst young people until their son's or daughter's 18th birthday when suddenly the partygoers' drinking behaviour was out in the open, i.e., they were legally able to drink. But realistically, it is as ...