On Earth Undead
CD features Cryogenic, Tatoo Blue, Deadspawn and Ken Mitchell
Video produced by Art Resistance
Available through South Western Sydney Area Health Service, PO Box 39, Liverpool NSW 2170
Reviewed by Norm Dixon
Drug and alcohol education campaigns directed at young people are generally patronising, moralistic and misdirected. They tend to waver between the naive, lecturing "Just say No"-style ads, accompanied by overacted scenes of vomiting and fist-fighting, and horror videos of young drivers killing their best mate/girlfriend/sister in accidents. You only have to sit in a cinema when these ads are screened and listen to the derision they evoke to realise they are not effective.
On Earth Undead attempts to leave this approach behind. It is an initiative of the South Western Sydney Area Health Service Drug and Alcohol Centre, which covers a vast area of Sydney between Bankstown and Campbelltown with one of the fastest growing populations of young people between the ages of 12 and 24 years.
The service's Tribes Project, which led to the CD and video, worked closely with young people in the Fairfield-Liverpool area to produce educational material about the dangers of alcohol abuse that young people could directly relate to. Both the CD and the video are centred on punters in the metal/thrash music scene. The approach used is "harm minimisation": the promotion of safe, sensible use of alcohol and drugs rather than attempting to moralise against it.
The result is a CD and a video in which young people talk directly to young people about the damage of overdoing it in language they understand. They discuss strategies to drink less, fob off mates who insist you have another one and deal with friends who are off their faces. The enthusiastically raucous music delivers the message well. The CD features three metal/thrash groups — Cryogenic, Tatoo Blue and Deadspawn — and Ken Mitchell. The video is a fast-paced video-clip style production that would be at home on Rage or Recovery.
But will listening to this CD and watching the video make a difference to young people's alcohol intake? Probably not. Like all other health campaigns, it starts with the assumption that once people know the dangers of chemical abuse, they will choose to stop. As the young people in the video prove, they know the ill effects only too well, yet they obliterate themselves regardless.
The most basic cause of drug and alcohol abuse is social, and this is ignored. Young people feel powerless, alienated and insecure. Chemicals are an escape from a rotten society that can't provide enough jobs, a decent education system or an adequate income, a society of crumbling facilities, little public recreation and no hope that things might get any better. Only when society can promise that will the epidemic of harmful substance abuse subside.
Green Left Weekly has five copies of the On Earth Undead CD to give away to the first five people who ring our office between 2 and 3pm on Friday, January 31. Ring (02) 9690 1220.