Editor's note
Drugs for Reflection
Can you imagine a disco with the usual loud music and flashing lights, with youths not dancing but standing in the middle of the floor, staring, sometimes for 10 minutes in a row?
Not being the scene of a sci-fi movie, it can only be what you’ve probably guessed already, drug induced.
The scene is in fact real and apparently happens every weekend in Zhuhai and (even though less) in Macau.
By the way, most of these youths are from the territory, crossing the border on Fridays and Saturdays nights for a “bit of fun”.
Apparently Zhuhai, apart from being the first city Macau residents find in continental China, became a sort of drugs heaven: there’s large supplies, variety and what’s better for traffickers and consumers, drugs are cheap. The article “War without End” is a comprehensive portrait of the local drug scene in the moment when the
government has decided to create a committee to fight drug-related crimes. If bad old heroin is still well established in the city, the alarming rise on the consumption of ecstasy and ketamine (the one responsible for the zombie-like people in the disco) amongst the youth makes you think that it really can happen to anyone. What keeps striking me is how the word “fun” is so easily associated to drugs. I suppose that’s the most dangerous word combination that one needs to fight, to start with. Experts around the world will tell to forget the old cliché of youngsters engaging in drugs due to fractured families, abandonment and so on. I mean, it might happen to these troubled kids as it might happen to a child of a loving balanced family, with a down-to-earth education where the facts of life were not omitted or distorted. So what are we to do? I don’t have the answer, but I also don’t believe in lengthy sentences for young consumers. The prison will probably enhance the bad habit and it usually comes with a package of other equally serious vices.
I think that family must be more involved, and I think we need to care about our children. Care also means to disagree, confront, face your children and explain
your opinion, especially in those teenage years when parents become a liability in their lives and the “rolling eyes” attitude is the answer for every sentence older people pronounce. School needs also to play its role properly with serious programs that should be interactive and include real life testimonies about drugs, going beyond the good-intended booklets “selling” an anti-drug message that sounds alien and often silly to many of the readers.
I suppose the key word here to confront the kind of fun described above is INFORMATION. A good friend of mine who is psychologist and mother of three, tells me how amazed she always is to find out how incredibly ignorant and confused teenagers can be in this so-called information age. Drugs, sex and other issues need to be addressed to students, but are sometimes thrown to them by unprepared staff, without any sort of contextualization. So it’s probably a good time to have a chat with your teenage kids. And please ignore their annoyed faces. They will get over it, if you really care.