Sex, drugs and our right to decide
Marina Carman
The $5 million National Alcohol Campaign has hit our TV screens. In the two advertisements, teenagers drinking alcohol end up either having unsafe sex or beating someone up. The campaign includes web sites for young people and parents, brochures and magazine ads titled "How much did your teenager drink last night?".
While claiming to target "excessive" drinking, the general messages of this campaign are "bad things happen when you drink" and " why aren't you setting limits on your children?".
Drug addiction and abuse are serious social problems, but the government is trying to shirk its responsibility for solving these problems by turning them into "moral" issues for young people and parents. In doing so, it is attempting to enforce its conservative morals onto all of us.
Drugs
The new ads are part of the Coalition federal government's "zero tolerance" approach to drugs, a move away from the previous focus on education and harm minimisation: "Say no to drugs" is in, promoting safer drug use is out.
In 1998, the Howard government announced a new anti-drugs funding package of $102 million. This followed a $89.5 million allocation in November 1997. Of the total amount, around $95 million was allocated to police forces to "target each step in the drug chain", $39 million went to Howard's hand-picked National Council on Drugs and $55 million went to treatment services.
The 1997 United Nations World Drug Report reveals that the Australian government spends 14 times more on policing drug use than on treatment of people with drug problems, and more than eight times what it spends on drug education.
Of course, public education about drugs is going to have limited success if nothing is done to address the social problems which lead to drug abuse. The National Drug Strategy (NDS) web site claims that, as a result of government programs over the last 10 years, "Greater success was achieved in the areas of tobacco and alcohol, less for pharmaceuticals, and results were poor, relative to the successes in other areas, for illicit drugs".
However, it is questionable whether the very small changes in tobacco use (down 6%) and alcohol use ("hazardous" use once a week down 5%) are attributable to the NDS. Amongst young people, tobacco and alcohol use, and consuming drugs to harmful levels, are increasing.
The government is doing little to address the fact that many young people drink or take drugs to harmful levels to neutralise the psychological impacts of unemployment or crappy jobs, rising education costs, cuts to youth income support, sexist expectations about their appearance, racist abuse, etc. Appointing former Victorian Liberal premier Jeff Kennett to lead up a new $3 million national anti-depression program is hardly going to help!
Removing jail sentences for cannabis use, instituting heroin trials (where free heroin is distributed to a small number of registered users) and allowing safe shooting galleries would all be steps in the right direction. The federal government has opposed all of these proposals.
If drug use was decriminalised, the profits made from the production and distribution of many drugs would be drastically reduced and many of the dangers to users' health and well-being associated with the drugs' illegality would be removed.
Drug dependency and abuse are principally social health and welfare issues and to deal with them effectively governments must massively increase funding to the public education and health care systems, increase welfare and youth support services and create decent jobs for all who want them, not penalise individuals for using drugs.
Sex
It is no surprise that the new campaign appeals to the traditional family to "regulate" alcohol use. This is just another example of the Howard government's approach of limiting young people's choices.
The conservatives who run this country are pretty concerned about declining marriage and birth rates, young people exploring their sexuality and extra-marital sex.
To Have and to Hold, a 1998 report prepared by the Federal Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee, if just one of the efforts being made to shore up traditional (i.e., conservative) family life. It implicates "marital disruption" in youth suicide, depression and "early sexual activity", and links cohabitation (rather than marriage) to drug use, drinking, sexual freedom and "social deviance".
The government tried, unsuccessfully, to ban two major films in the last two years — Lolita and Romance. While these films do depict some of the more alienated aspects of sexuality, the censorship attempts were aimed at enforcing the government's conservative views on all of us.
Howard sees the family as "the most efficient welfare system" and is busily reimposing the burden of child-care, aged care and education onto individual families. This is backed up by an ideological campaign that stresses women's primary role as wives and mothers, and promotes the "ideal" of obedient, heterosexual, celibate children who stay at home until they get married.
If we are to be able to make other life choices we must campaign for adequate youth incomes, comprehensive sex education, condom vending machines in schools and community facilities, and equal age of consent laws for gay and lesbian youth. We must reject Howard and co's conservatism and argue for more choices for young people, not less.