Death by denial

Cover Stories

Reports by Sophie Foster

The problem of substance abuse among our youth is a fact. And if the only available soultion is prison, then with half the Pacific population under the age of 25, it is likely a large number of the region’s future leaders will have criminal records next to their names.

There is a dearth of proper facilities, such as counselling, to deal with sub stance abuse in Pacific Island countries, and the issue, which could grow to tragic proportions, seems largely swept under the carpet perhaps in the hope that it will die a natural death.

A report prepared for the United Nations International Children’s Fund and titled “Youth, Alcohol and Other Drugs in the Pacific” has warned that the incidence of substance abuse among young people is bound to get a lot worse - even if there is a conscious effort to address the prob lem now.

But the author of the report, Jim Mielke, stressed that making no attempt to address the issue now would mean the situation becomes even more difficult to deal with later, and more costly for tax payers and Pacific societies.

“The bottom line seems to be that even with continued work to address substance

abuse by young people happening steadi

ly for the next coming years, it will be a slow process - and it probably will get worse before it gets better,” Mielke said during an interview with Pacific Islands

Monthly.

But what is the solution for Island societies, where half the population com

prises young people struggling to deal

with social changes in the Pacific of the 90’s?

The UNICEF report emphasised that new approaches - specific and relevant to the Islands - would have to be imple mented to combat the widespread inci dence of substance abuse among the youth, and loss of future productivity.

“There is a major concern here demographically, more than half the Pacific is under 25. These are young-peo ple countries, it’s a young-people world, half the world is under 25,” Mielke said.

He controversially suggests decrimi nalising first-time substance abuse and

being in possession of illicit drugs.

A certain proportion of the population

Ignoring substance abuse among they oat) But mill decriminalisation work , as has beer

in any given country would experiment with drugs and be prone to substance abuse, Mielke said. But with the criminal isation of drugs the only option, there would be more and more young people in

prisons.

“It’s going to happen in any population

and that proportion is getting bigger

because there are just more young people around,” he said.

“There needs to be a system where there are alternatives to prison, such as counselling, community service or social service. Because, if they go to prison, they find it hard to go back to school and pick up from where they started going off track,” he said.

Mielke said the hard-line policy on substance abuse had been adopted from the UN’s anti-drug status and the United States’ conservative stance on drugs, but Pacific Island countries had to create a policy which would work for them.

“We need to look at it in the local con text - see what works and what’s appro priate - because we’re learning from the rest of the world that some of this hard line approach doesn’t seem to have worked,” he said. And if the Pacific con tinued to instantly prosecute and convict first-time offenders, the majority of whom were young people, the development of island countries would suffer in the long term, he said.

Mielke said policy was important, especially in education and legislation.

“With marijuana, for example, the first offence in Fiji is three months’ imprison ment - and these are basically young peo ple. There’s something like 400 young people in prison for a first offence; a lot of these are students and, basically, it’s the beginning of the end for them,” he said.

New Zealand and Australia, he said, had adopted harm-reduction approaches, which did not instantly criminalise sub stance abuse but tried to help people avoid the harm that went with it.

Programmes such as the needle exchange scheme to prevent the sharing of needles for intravenous (IV) drug use were designed to help reduce Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) risk, he said.

But before alternative action could be put in place, governments would have to

won’t make it go away, suggested?