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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-25/calls-for-drug-rehabilitation-to-replace-criminal-punishment-qld/12588392

Anti-drug laws were always meant to be a vehicle to protect Community, family and our most important asset, children, from the harms caused by permission models that ‘grown ups’ believe they have the right to exercise around the use of psychotropic toxins.

These protective laws have not been used in any real punitive context for years.

It’s time we tasked these protective laws again in their most proactive framework – As the ‘Judicial Educator’.

The law used (not in a punitive context) but as with Problem Solving Courts, to facilitate not only exit from drug use, but entrance into productive, safe, health and community benefiting narratives, that are drug free.  You don’t have to change laws, but you can task that legislation to facilitate rehabilitation and recovery, as is being done more and more to great success.

The pro-drug lobbies completely fallacious meme of ‘war on drugs has failed’ only has traction for the uniformed. There has been now ‘war on drugs’ in this nation since 1985.  However, the ever growing ‘war FOR drugs’ continues to look to remove genuine tools that can bring best-practice drug use exiting outcomes, by mislabelling and propagandizing.

The Judicial educator is the perfect bookend for the other bookend of health and education. Together these will see, not further ‘permission’ for drug use and the ensuing uptake that always precipitates, but rather, as with Tobacco, a community with One Voice, Once Message and One Focus – the cessation of humanity, dignity, agency and family devastating drug use. That should be the agenda of all drug use reduction vehicles. The excising of any vehicle that can assist with that proactive and productive end, is not only non-sense, it is only adding to the harms that drug use does to our communities.

Once psychotropic toxins are an intrenched part of the behavioural mechanisms of an individual, whether it be short-term intoxication, or long-term dependency, the risk to health, safety and well-being of that individual and more concerningly, those around them requires more than a ‘doctor’ for change. Secure welfare engaged for rehabilitation continues to prove the safest and healthiest vehicle to assist that change.

We seem to care more for Tobacco users, than illicit drug users – Don’t the latter deserve the same passionate enabling to exit drug use, with no voice of permission or approval in the marketplace?

Rather there must be a thorough enabling, equipping and empowering of drug users to exit drug use, even more importantly before the inevitable dependency takes hold.

Any permission model – decriminalisation, legalisation or depenalization – does not add to that capacity of drug users to move out of drug use. However, it has and will continue to do so, if the only proactively coercive vehicle – The Law – is removed, further normalizing drug use.

This study found:

• Children’s risk of marijuana and alcohol use and attitudes toward marijuana were influenced by their parents’ marijuana use pattern over time.
• Children whose parents used marijuana primarily during adolescence/early adulthood and those whose parents continued to use marijuana from adolescence through adulthood were at highest risk.

When parents use drugs such as marijuana, their children may also be affected. Numerous studies have shown that current parental marijuana use increases the children’s risk of substance use and other psychiatric problems. A recent NIDA-sponsored study demonstrates that the parents’ history of marijuana use throughout their lifetime may also affect their children’s outcomes and that some lifetime use patterns are more harmful than others

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When Jessica Birch says "make or break" she really means it. 

If these accommodations aren't made, she could be in bed for days recovering. 

The 34-year-old has Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD), a lifelong, permanent and debilitating disorder which is caused when alcohol crosses the placenta to the developing baby during pregnancy.

Jessica's many symptoms include chronic fatigue, a sleep disorder, heart rate, digestion, and sweat glands that function erratically and problems with her autonomic nervous system. But the reality of what that actually looks like in everyday life, is where people struggle to understand 

"I need a lot of brainpower to perform basic tasks. If someone is trying to speak to me while I am making a coffee, for example, it becomes very difficult to make the coffee. I can't respond to someone and process what they are saying, if I am doing something else," Jessica explained. 

"I can't drink water from a water bottle and walk at the same time. Sometimes it may take 20 seconds for me to actually register what is being said to me," she added.   

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