Drugs are out there

If there's an upside to your mother dying at home from cancer, it's that there is a stack of heavy-duty narcotics left lying around the house once she goes.

So says, rather bitterly, an old mate who lost his beautiful mum last year and has been working his way through the piles of left-over ketamine and OxyNorm the palliative care nurses used to keep her pain at bay.

He jokingly invited me over the other week to share a ''heroin lollipop'', his name for the ''compressed fentanyl lozenges'' with ''integral oromucosal applicator'' (aka a stick) his mum sucked on between her shots of morphine.

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When I demurred, he tried to sway me with an offer of snorting OxyNorm - aka ''hillbilly heroin'' - a fast-onset opioid he calls his closest experience to ''returning to the womb''.

I again declined (friends, eh?), which didn't stop him Googling government websites to check doses and contra-indications with my asthma medication, you know, in case I changed my mind.

As he listed the research-verified side effects of the drug, it struck me this would be useful information to make available to the most vulnerable segment of recreational drug users - our young people.

It might not have been one of the recommendations of this month's report The Prohibition of Illicit Drugs is Killing and Criminalising Our Children and We Are All Letting it Happen but, as you can see from its title, it falls well within the spirit.

In that report, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare revealed 40 per cent of Australians aged 14 and older had used an illicit drug in 2010, with 15 per cent using one or more in the past 12 months.

It'd be nice to think our children are part of the non-drug-using majority but it's undeniable tens of thousands of teens are experimenting, not just with marijuana but a slew of new drugs with improbable names like 2CT, DMT and Meow.

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Drugs are out there