This is drugs. This is your website on drugs. Any questions?
I messed up my entire life because I got high
I lost my kids and wife because I got high say
Now I’m sleepin’ on the side walk and I know why
Because I got high, because I got high, because I got high- Because I Got High, by Afroman
It’s true, we get more than the occasional wake-up call from the emails we get and from the chats people have with volunteers. And it’s true, sometimes it’s brought to our attention that some of our material could use an update. The Drugs & Alcohol learning section is one example… And to be fair, it’s hard to know what to write on the subject.
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One on hand, you have folks like the Government of Canada’s National Anti-Drug Strategy, and Health Canada’s attempts to reach kids using sites like Not4Me and The Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse’s very similar (though flashier) Xperiment.ca. Truth be told, the current content of our site isn’t too far off this, basically saying this is why you shouldn’t do “drug X”. It all has the potential to be informative (“Holy crap, I didn’t know I could get dry mouth from MDMA! It’s so not for me!“) but I suspect many people know that drugs can be bad for you. And much like with education around smoking, it’s sometimes hard to take the side effects listed on these sites at face value, even if they are true in theory.
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On the other hand, you have organizations like VANDU (Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users), Insite (the safe injection site in the Downtown Eastside) and YouthCO AIDS Society, who contend that what we should be focusing on is the fact that drug users are marginalized, criminalized, stigmatized and denied proper health care. The focus of these harm reduction organizations is usually around creating support for people involved in intravenous drug use or related health issues like Hepatitis C or HIV. The more mainstream criticism of harm reduction is that it does nothing to keep people from using, and may even encourage them.
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It’s not an easy decision and, even once the decision is made, it’s not easy to know what we should put up on the site. By the time the update is done, we’ll probably end up with a lot of both sides of the story, since our basic philosophy features a lot of harm reduction, but people still often want to know “what drugs do”. But we’ll be working on it so be patient with us… we’re working very hard to try to suck less. ^_^
And if you’re curious where the title of this week’s entry comes from, it’s from this fairly popular public service announcement from the 80′s:
(This is your brain with a side order of bacon)
