Worry teased
False alarm
While working away today (hooray for working from bed) I got a message from my brother: "Hey can you call my landline as soon as possible. Urgent". As one would, I go into instant worry mode. Oh no, what's wrong, who's hurt, etc etc. Doubly so given that my grandfather, who I'm very fond of, is rather unwell.
Well, it turns out he wanted to start organizing our dive trip to Ningaloo in mid-April. Heh. Heart, be calm, false alarm!
Hence: worry teased. It just goes to show how completely different things can be from what you initially assume (at least if you're a fusspot like me).
Drugs, death and the Big Day Out
Anyway, speaking of dramas and my brother: I've always tended to take an interest in police issues, but much more so since Paul (said brother) took up his job as a policeman in Wellington. I'd heard about the overdose death at the Big Day Out, but had no idea anyone was trying to blame it on the police. WTF?
Perhaps people should be expected to have some degree of personal responsibility?
The public as a whole generally supports bans of alcohol - a legal drug - including search and seizure for leavers events on Rottnest and down south, at events like the Big Day Out, etc. (M'self ... I'm of two minds on that). It is assumed that illegal drugs will also be seized, and I seem to remember stories talking about how much cannabis, E, etc was siezed from leavers heading down to Dunsborough last year. Media and public support at the time appeared to be behind the police as they controlled those awful rowdy teenager types. Is the Big Day Out any different?
The search and seizure of drugs by the police at the Big Day Out was instituted after problems with deaths and near-deaths from alcohol poisoning, drug overdoses, etc at previous Big Day Out events. The event organizers have been blamed in the past for not preventing these, as well as other things they could not possibly know about or prevent.
The police did not force the girl who died recently to do anything. She made a very stupid decision and was probably prompted to do it by fear of being caught. However, it's been pointed out that she could've just as easily discarded the pills (or some of them) instead of taking them. Or given them to friends. Whatever. She was knowingly breaking the law and the event rules, and was only frightened of being caught doing it and facing the consequences, which she knew beforehand, of her choices.
The police are required to enforce the law, which they were doing without anything that seems excessive to me. I'm not a huge fan of sniffer dogs, mind you, but I wouldn't count them as intimidation or excessive force. Anybody who has taken an international flight has probably been subject to much more heavy-handed and intrusive treatment by people who aren't even police officers, and for (IMO) generally much less reason. I have never seen airport security blamed because someone died after scoffing the pills they were trying to smuggle. Then again, few people are that stupid.
I'm confident that the BDO and/or police would've been blamed had there not been searches, and somebody had died of an overdose. "You should've prevented them from sneaking those drugs in there" they'd cry! Sigh. The media and the public just want somebody to blame, and the media loves a good upset.. I work for a newspaper; I know it well.
I won't get into details of what drugs (currently legal OR illegal) should/should not be legal here. That topic has been well explored, and I can't say much that's not repeating others' better researched and worded comments. Let's just say that there's certainly a continuum of harmfulness (to the self and to others), that the law as it stands appears to be somewhat arbitrary if you evaluate various drugs according to relative harm, and that it's likely that some sort of change probably makes sense. Despite what the various entrenched positions tend to claim, though, the relative harmfulness of various drugs is far from clear-cut or all that well understood. There's also the issue of the extent to which the law should just protect you from harming others, and the extent to which it should try to prevent you from harming yourself. It's just not as simple as people seem to think.