YOUNG DISBELIEVE DRUG WARNINGS

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31984, 10 May 1969, Page 2

YOUNG DISBELIEVE DRUG WARNINGS

Young people had become disinclined to believe warnings about lilUcit use of drugs because of the number of mythological and distorted statements that had been made by people who should know better, Dr D. R. Dobson, head of the North Canterbury Hospital Board’s department of psychiatric medicine, said this week.

He was ; replying to questions put by members of the Canterbury branch of the Society for Research on Women in New Zealand, after they had seen two American films on drug abuse, one dealing specifically with L.S.D. “Enthusiasts in keeping the kids off drugs, and tots applies more to law enforcement, officers .than to scientists, have created a credi-

bility gap with inaccurate statements. The standard of logic used in some of their deductions would not be ac-

cepted in other. areas,” he said.

Dr Dobson said there were i two schools of thought as to i why young persons turned to i drugs. The first was that the young persons who became 1 involved were ordinary, i healthy youngsters with ordinary, healthy problems, who came by accident into contact with drugs and who, had they been kept away from drugs, would have been content with the socially-acceptable drugs such as tobacco and alcohol. SERVICES INADEQUATE “The other belief, and the one to which I subscribe, is that there is a growing number of grossly disturbed young people, with serious personal problems for whom our services are inadequate. “In other words the growing rate of illicit drug use has merely highlighted to the ' public something that only ' social workers and doctors ' were aware of previously.” In reference to the drug,

L.S.D., Dr Dobson said it was unproven, and he himself doubted that L.S.D. would cause permanent mental illness.

“Many of those who enter hospitals with effects of this drug have just precipitated the effect of an Illness they already had,” he said. “L.S.D. can be a useful tool in the right hands in a course of properly conducted psychotheraputic methods, but I cannot approve of illicit use of the drug," he said. “This illicit use, in uncontrolled experiments with illicitly-made samples of L.S.D., which are of unknown quantity and intensity, is very dangerous," he said.

GENETIC DEFECTS In the film on L.S.D. there had been reference to research being conducted on the drug in connection with the breaking of chromosomes in the blood. It had been shown that L.S.D. did cause chromosome breakage, and it was suggested that this could cause genetic and heriditary defects such as had been experienced with thalidomide, which was responsible for its malformations because of chromosome breakage. In reply to a question on this, Dr Dobson said that a number of other drugs used in medicine were also responsible for chromosome breakage. “In fact present evidence suggests that the rate and frequency of chromosome breakage occurs just as readily with aspirin as with L.5.D.,” he said. “After all we must keep the whole question in perspective. Tobacco has proved to be a much more fearsome thing than morphine or heroin—it’s a killer.”