EXPERIMENTATION

The government seems to have a vested interest in keeping our society on legal drugs otherwise our G.S.T or P.A.Y.E tax burden would be so high the fermenting of revolution could outstrip the same process with alcohol. It is a hypocritical stance for any government to profit from drugs whilst at the same time attempting to reduce costs attributable to their use, but then those we elect are supposedly a reflection of ourselves.

I find it very hard to accept that the local Publican is the legal distributor of one drug whilst one of his patrons may be the illegal distributor of another. Both drugs cause anger, abuse, accidents, assault, robbery, misery, anguish, sadness, poverty and death yet there remains this gulf between legal and illegal.

I worry about the double standards of our community, that one accepts the drunk falling in the gutter as someone whose just had a little too much to drink and we might laugh at his mistake, but the guy falling into the gutter with a joint in his hand is someone who should be shunned, ostracised and imprisoned for having smoked old rope and we ‘tut tut’ about our neighbours faults all the way home.

I can quite happily smoke and go to a Christmas Party and drink that’s OK but what would happen if anyone came to my office and found a needle hanging out of my arm? Am I still not the same Warwick? Now I’m not suggesting that the bosses suddenly get the idea of raiding my little corner of the world, I keep it too well guarded, but merely point out that we all, myself included, seem to find some drug use acceptable and others an abomination and need to watch ourselves as workers that we don’t get caught up in the same double standards when taking young people into our care.

What has this anarchical stance to do with the price of eggs? Who actually determines at what age we can do or not do certain things? Why do we keep engaged with such double standards?

It is quite legal for a girl to have sex at 16 but a boy has to wait until he’s 18. In this day and age, from what I know, the age at which this activity is taking place is going down even though the age of marriage seems to be accelerating in the other direction.

With adolescence comes experimentation with adulthood and while we might dread the thought that they are becoming young adults.

With information and support we should be allowing our young people to experiment and make mistakes provided that their emotional and chronological age is sufficient to absorb what is being learned by the experience.

While our society is crying out to allow children to be children the market economy is encouraging them to become adult as quickly as possible. That market economy includes the legal and illegal drug businesses.

Establishing trust with the people we work with, and children in our care whether genetically connected or not, is paramount to building relationships that can withstand the stress and strain of their daily lives. I am a supporter of experimentation. Perhaps this is why I have unbounded patience with children and adolescents yet the opposite when working with supposedly mature adults.

We should feel that we are doing our job well when young people can rely on us to be there when the shit hits the fan. It certainly places great stress upon us all at times but then we should not have signed up if we were not prepared to sacrifice some of our time.

It is sometimes my downfall when I allow young people to be free thinkers, that I imbue my clients with intelligence automatically, and certainly make some errors when I believe that what they are telling me is the truth. But in my line of work, where I am employed to give young people the right to decide for themselves what they need, a consequence of that is becoming merely a vassal or facilitator in achieving those goals.

To this day and into the foreseeable future I will continue to avoid determining a young persons ability to succeed based on some chronological measure or educational level and rely on the fact that by making mistakes we learn how not to make them again. From the time of ‘self-realisation’ children are experimenting and learning and I would like to be keep apace with that part of their experience.