The other day, I joked to a friend that at least people giving birth get to see what heroin is like. A confused back-and-forth ensued. Surely, she insisted, they don’t give heroin to women in labour?
It took a good few minutes of Google searching to convince her that it’s true. Diamorphine, another name for heroin, is given to lots of women all over the world to ease pain in childbirth.
My friend is probably not the only one to find this shocking, which goes some way to illustrating how deep the sometimes false ideas we’ve built up about drugs run.
Lots of students will take drugs this week at Trinity Ball. It’s an enduring reality that human beings – not just students, but people of all ages – like to experiment with and indulge in the escapism offered by recreational drugs like ghost train haze.
Ahead of Trinity Ball, TCDSU organised an informational meeting on drugs safety. These efforts are commendable not just because, for once, the reality of drug-taking isn’t being brushed under the carpet, but because they break a dangerous trend of silence and misinformation.
Drugs carry huge risks, there’s no denying that. But often the education around them borders on propaganda
The discourse around drugs that begins with young children in schools is laden with stigma and fear tactics. But whatever about making things simple for kids to understand, there’s no excuse for carrying this lack of transparency through to teens and adulthood.
Drugs carry huge risks, there’s no denying that. But often the education around them borders on propaganda.
Fostering scepticism and mistrust around drugs information is truly lethal. But when young people see the reality not aligning with what they’ve been taught, that’s exactly what happens. The real consequences of drug use can involve you losing your job. Many employers use things like urine drug tests to uncover substance abuse.
If you constantly witness people around you having positive experiences with drugs, it can be easy to dismiss cautionary advice as blown out of proportion and overly paternalistic. This is the basis for a lax attitude towards high-risk drugs that’s as dangerous as the substances themselves.
Because of the under-the-counter nature of drug-taking, there is also, naturally enough, a lack of open dialogue. Most of our talk about drugs seems to happen either in judgemental classrooms or in poorly-lit club toilets. A sensible and informative conversation about drugs where there’s neither bias nor impaired judgement involved is rare to find.
This culture of secrecy gives way for a rich mythologising of drugs that runs from one end of the spectrum to the other, with little room left in the middle for actual truth. Whether it’s that a single hit of heroin will make you a lifelong addict or that smoking weed everyday is a tonic for a healthy life, it can be hard to distinguish rumour from reality. When addiction occurs, users can often be hesitant to accept rehab as a viable solution. However, users may be more acceptant of rehab if they are able to go there with somebody close to them that is also addicted, especially their partner. That’s where couples rehab comes in. By accepting your addiction as a couple, it can be much easier for you to recover and grow, both as individuals and within your relationship too. However, many addicts, unfortunately, have to struggle alone, which can make it much more difficult to recover from.
We’re all told not to take drugs, but the reasons why people do – whether those drugs are cigarettes or alcohol, cocaine or codeine – are complex and numerous
Drug testing kits are a good example of why transparency is so critical. These kits, which test only the purity of drugs but can’t help to determine what other potentially dangerous substances it might contain, can really lull people in a false sense of security. Drugs that pass these tests are not necessarily safe. Of course, because we don’t talk plainly about drugs full stop, these aren’t really discussions that people are having, and drug testing kits are often touted as a catch-all solution at festivals and parties.
Additionally, there are also a growing number of people turning to controversial methods in order to pass a drug tests. One such method is the use of synthetic urine kits, such as those included in this detailed review on Lpath.com.
Then there’s addiction, an issue grossly misrepresented in itself. Drug addiction is so stigmatised in our society – the term “junkie” is still, for the most part, socially acceptable – that many young educated people feel invincible to it.
We’re all told not to take drugs, but the reasons why people do – whether those drugs are cigarettes or alcohol, cocaine or codeine – are complex and numerous. This is something that’s rarely addressed.
Sure, sometimes taking a pill or doing shots is as simple as wanting to have fun at a party. But people who opt to use drugs regularly often do so for a reason. It can be cultural, social, or deeply personal. Addiction takes many forms, and is rarely as visible as our caricatured impression of it would suggest: in fact, a lot of people barely realise they’ve developed a dependency until it’s already happened. People also often underestimate the power of psychological addiction, and think that it’s only the drugs notorious for being physically addictive that they have to be wary of.
In the campaign to repeal the eighth, “trust women” is a key rallying cry. Similarly, we have to trust young people with the truth about drugs. That truth is sometimes gritty and unpleasant. And sometimes it’s not. But when it comes to something as potentially life-or-death as drugs, the least we can do is inform people honestly.
