Page 55 - WHACK35

Today a friend of mine sent me a Facebook post that a
club promoter had put up on his page. The picture has 2
frames, one of a young attractive looking man doing…some-
thing with his neck? Looking cool? Is he trying to look cool?
I guess that’s what it is. The next frame has a less attractive 5
looking young man lying on the concrete, hands in his pants,
passed out. The frames have the words, ‘Expectation’ and
‘Reality’ across the top and, ‘GHB Kills’ at the bottom. The
picture is accompanied by a lengthy call from the promoter
for people to not take GHB.

Today I am reminded again that we do not really have a
war on drugs. It has always been a war between drugs. The
battle grounds of this war are not set between abstainer and
consumer. Like children arguing over which flavour of ice
cream is better, the battles are between those who essentially
have different tastes in psychoactive substances.

Each psychoactive substance has its own unique set of 5. RE VIE WIN G AND
costs, benefits, effects, culture of use and integration. The
way someone first accesses drugs will have an effect on their A SS E SS IN G THE
choices, along with the way they currently access drugs. This E FFEC TIVE NE SS
is the nature of the black market through which we all ob-
tain our psychoactive substances of choice. O F L AWS AND
REG U L ATI O NS
It’s become a somewhat populist movement among the
pill-pounding, grog-swilling club scene to lash out at the RE L ATIN G TO
ice-heads and wobbly juicy folk. The lash is almost always
expressed in a prescriptive manner, where the lasher knows ILLI CIT AND
far better than the lashee about what’s good for them and if S Y NTH E TI C D RUG S;
they would just stop being bloody idiots, all these problems
would stop. AND

I’ll ask you now to recollect every anti-drug advertisement
you’ve seen. Swish them around inside your skull a bit. The
focus of almost every single one of them will be to belit-
tle, demean and stigmatise the ‘user’ of a certain drug. The
campaigns use perceptions of the drug and its effects to try
to scare other people from taking it. Stoner Sloth is a great
(and bleedingly bloody obvious) example of this. A few years
back, another anti-cannabis campaign focused on a bunch
of young people ‘wasting their potential’ because of their
cannabis use. My favourite in this series was a picture of a
young bloke, knees in pool, looking depressed. The words
above him read, ‘Smoking marijuana wastes potential’. Then Novel
I thought of American swimmer Michael Phelps and his 22
Olympic medals, ripping bongs at some party.

The message of these anti-drug messages is simple. If you
do whatever drug they’re talking about, you will end up like Psychoactive
the person in the ad. This is why these campaigns are inef-
fective. They preach to those who don’t take the drug and
they stigmatise those who do use the drug, without provid-
ing any useful information. There is no dialogue between
those who might have some good information and those Substances
without good information.

TO R 5 : N O V E L P S YC H O A C T I V E S U B S TA N C E S ( N P S ) 55

WHACK35_LYOT.indd 55 11-Oct-16 4:25:32 PM