Pubdate: Thu, 30 Jun 2005
Source: Outlook, The (CN BC)
Copyright: 2005 The Outlook
Contact:  http://www.northshoreoutlook.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1433
Author: Denny Boyd
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/youth.htm (Youth)

BOYD'S TOWN

Every time I read about teens turning their brains into lumps of 
gristle through crystal meth use, I pull at my hair and rage at the 
lack of common knowledge.

I howl, Good God, everyone knows that stuff is a killer. Don't they 
read the papers?"

Well, no. I don't think they do read the papers. I don't think they 
watch television news reports, or listen to the tragic first-person 
confessions of ruined young lives on talkshow programs.

Bill Good has just won a prestigious international award for a 
gripping radio program he did on meth. Some of the interviews would 
wrench your heart.

I listened to it, so perhaps did you, and we had to be alarmed by the 
first-rate reporting and interviews.

Just one problem. It aired in the morning. How many vulnerable 
teen-agers were listening to a non-music radio station in the 
morning? The invaluable broadcast was lost on the age group that 
needed it most.

The Vancouver Sun some months ago ran a week-long series on the easy 
availability of meth, it's diabolically addictive grip from the first 
taste and the horrific damage it causes.

But how many teens read the papers? When was the last time you saw a 
student reading the morning paper on the bus on the way to school? 
When you sit near an animated group of high-schoolers at Starbucks, 
are they discussing an editorial they all read?

Not bloody likely. They don't read the papers because there isn't 
much there for them.

So when they eagerly jump into meth to impress their peers (the only 
group they slavishly believe in) it's not through bravado or a 
feeling of invincibility, it's from ignorance. They simply have not 
plugged into the torrent of information on drugs that is available to 
them, but bypassed by them.

I wonder what would be the reaction to a senior student walking into 
school with a rolled-up New York Times under his arm. A right proper 
taunting, most likely.

Yet the majority of those students will walk into school with an 
inexpensive cell phone in his or her pocket, a form of communication 
which dispenses no knowledge whatsoever beyond where the party is 
Saturday night. Yet they clutch those tiny electronic marvels as if 
they were Rosetta stones.

Their cells are so precious to them that they will clamp them to 
their ears with no-one on the line, just for the comfort, like Maggie 
Simpson with her soother.

The landline telephone system is regulated by a massive bureaucracy.

Pity then that it cannot be law that every cell phone be programmed 
with a permanent message, saying, Meth wants to kill you. Have a nice day."
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MAP posted-by: Beth