News Corp. Would Rather Your Kids Get AIDS Than Get Stoned

I'm not making this up.

For what may well be the eighty-seventh time this week, I find myself making haste through a crowded public space, my gait that of an absconded mental patient, desperately trying to burn in to the front of my brain by way of a repetitious mumble-chant (which I would imagine is making passers-by more than a little disconcerted) a permanent reminder that I must, must, must, must, must, must, must, f*****g MUST stop reading the front page of the Daily Telegraph. And this time I mean it.

I know, as well as anybody in this city with enough hair between their folds should, that no good or useful information can come from the unhealthy habit. But alas, every 11:00 am it is consistently and obtusely on display right next to the cigarette counter in the Coles near my methadone clinic, at which time of day I assuredly am operating on base instinct at best; thus, nine times out of ten, I have absorbed the foul moveable printed type irreversibly in to my consciousness before I can know what's happening. No publication has ever, through a disinterested passing glance no less, had the power to instill in me so quickly and efficiently such a unique and potent combination of disbelief, depression, genuine concern for the well-being of humanity and the kind of indignant, murderous outrage usually reserved for child-molesters and white-supremacists. No local publication anyway.

You’ll find no argument from me that I should be used to it by now. The hard-learned knowledge that it is a newspaper in name alone really should serve to equip me against this daily assault on human decency and allow me to take every slanderous opinion piece made to look like proven research with a big bag o’ salt. Perhaps even follow the examples of some of my more level-headed associates and prize some modicum of humour from this daily, dire dosage of bigotry and bullshit and Andrew Bolt - just shrug and giggle and say "such high-paid idiocy, oh well, takes all types". Just remind myself, with melancholy but maturity, that one must occasionally laugh in the face of outrage. But I just can't - this s**t isn’t funny.

You may, by now, be taking all side bets on what exactly the front-page headline was that I’m so pissed off about; or you may very well have lost all capacity to care even slightly, because, with every passing mouse-click on every protruding link to every pretentious blog clogging up your Facebook timeline, you see and hear more and more (and more) passionate, well-meaning young people tell you of how News Corp.'s numerous media outlets blatantly dedicate more air time and article space to discussions about what a terrible nuisance Pokémon GO! players are than to investigations in to the systematic torture of Indigenous juvenile inmates, and you think "yep, you’re spot on about that mate, and what the f**k are YOU going to do about it? Eh? Oh that’s right, type." I feel the pain guys, I really do, and I whole-heartedly agree…but for now typing is all I can offer. When the revolution starts, call me.

So here - I’ll show you as much as I can bear to:

DRUG INJECTING ROOM INSANITY -

Crazy bid to open heroin room to children and pregnant mums.

The outrageous plan, contained in a document obtained by The Daily Telegraph, was prepared as part of the five-yearly review of the Medically Supervised Injecting Centre in Kings Cross.

"Individuals under 18 are excluded from the part of the MSIC that is used for injecting," the document says.

"It is likely that by continuing to exclude those under 18 from using the centre, they will inject somewhere else, in less safe circumstances.

"There have been seven instances in the last six years where staff at the centre have had to deny access on the basis that the individual was under 18 years of age."

On pregnant women, the document says: "Excluding pregnant women from any treatment facility, including the injecting room, does not prevent exposure of the foetus to drugs or alcohol."

Acting Premier Troy Grant slammed the proposal as "ridiculous" and "offensive" and said he would make sure it would not proceed.

Well, no matter where you go, there you are.

Before I go any further let me say this - I’ve never studied journalism. I did not finish Year 12. My vocabulary and my grammar have very probably deteriorated steadily since around my thirteenth birthday. And even I know that words like "outrageous", "crazy" and "insanity" in a descriptive sense have no f*****g place in what is supposed to be a factual article on the front page of a major newspaper. Take note Daily Telegaff: subjective language like that is for an opinion piece like this one. In an article of this nature I can write something like ‘All living members of the Liberal party are casually sadistic, sub-human slime whose seeds should be stricken from the Earth for the good of its inhabitants’ with no evidence whatsoever to support my slanderous claim - the front page of your newspaper can not.

Duh.

Now to the actual issue under discussion. You know what the Daily Telegrass thinks about it because they told you - or rather they told me, against my will, and I told you (perhaps against yours). You may be able to guesstimate my stance on this difficult dilemma, and perhaps, given my history of addiction and incarceration, you’d be right to accuse me of being unfairly biased in favour of the criminals and drug-users of this country and their families. So, before I give in to my base desire and start swearing and slap-typing in an entirely unbecoming manner, allow me to quote somebody wiser than myself.

An effortlessly cool dude by the name of Kam (real name Craig A. Miller), an American hip-hop artist born, raised and still based in the notoriously violent Los Angeles African-American community of Watts (and incidentally, a long-time member of the Nation of Islam), said the following while being interviewed in a 1994 documentary entitled Dead Homies: "A lot of dudes, they come to the hood, or see it on the news, and they see the sickness that’s going on here - but they get confused…it’s like they wanna focus on the symptoms of the disease but ignore the cause of it. They think that a symptom of the sickness is the sickness itself."

Make no mistake - pregnant mothers and children are injecting drugs in this fair city of mine (and almost definitely yours as well). I’ve seen ‘em do it. That is a sad, ugly, unpalatable, arguably sick fact, but a fact it nonetheless remains. Seeking to lessen the impact and damage caused by this painful symptom of a sick society does not, in this writer's humble view, equate to an act of malicious insanity. 80% of the most obvious arguments I could spout have already been made in the very document that News Corp. have their proverbial panties so far up their flaps about: "excluding pregnant women from any treatment facility…does not prevent exposure of the foetus to drugs…" - "It is likely that by continuing to exclude those under 18 from using the centre, they will inject somewhere else, in less safe circumstances." Really, what more do you want?

Okay, here’s some insider knowledge for ya then: when individuals present to the injecting centre at Kings Cross (which is not exclusively for heroin use, despite what the above article may seem to claim) they must show photo I.D. and enter their names in to a database to gain entry. If and when pregnant mothers or underage kids show up at the clinic to use drugs intravenously, what’s to say they couldn’t be immediately put on an "at-risk" list? Children living with, or in danger of developing, serious drug problems could be put in early (or late) intervention programs. Pregnant mothers using drugs could be given the chance to enter rehabilitation or mentoring programs, through which they could be monitored, assisted with basic essentials and given the kind of counselling and support they need, hopefully to help ensure that their children aren't removed from their homes later in life, abused, neglected, left orphaned or, perish the thought, dead before their parents.

History the world over has shown clearly that enacting harm minimisation strategies in regards to narcotics does not result in higher levels of drug abuse. Portugal even decriminalised every previously illicit substance under the sun back in 2001, and declared the measures a success in 2009, endorsing them to the UN. The opening of the Kings Cross injecting centre did not cause heroin abuse to sky-rocket in Sydney. I highly doubt that allowing children and pregnant mothers a safe place to inject drugs will result in a generation of smack babies.

What’s worse? A 13-year-old with a heroin habit, or a 13-year-old contracting AIDS? A baby being born with serious problems because the mother was a problematic drug user, or a baby not being born at all because their mother overdosed in a fire escape?

Comparing these scenarios feels like a pointless, morbid exercise because it is. Surely the only thing that remains when all feelings of ill-ease and disgust at what the world has become are swept away is the safe and simple truth that whenever the opportunity to save a life presents itself it should be taken. I don’t know what the current status is of the effort to relax restrictions on the injecting room; I am a little scared to check because, if I find out that the aforementioned "news" article has had any kind of ill effect on the process, I honestly don’t know how I’ll react.

How’s this, Daily Telegrease? If the idea of pregnant mothers and underage children injecting drugs makes you uncomfortable, just try not to think about it. You seemed more than content with this plan of action up until recently; why stop now?

- 09/08/2016

Author's Note

I consistently overuse the word "consistently". The more I look at the title the less appropriate it seems but I tried to add "Safely" or "Indoors" to the end of it and it just doesn't have that same ring to it.