One Angry Monkey

Well for my reading pleasure the Australian government’s drug brochure arrived in the mail yesterday. Of only, right? No, it’s a booklet on how to talk to your kids about drugs. There goes that 17 billion surplus they were so worried about. Thank God they didn’t put that into education or hospitals. It started off badly, with a “personal” letter from our beloved prime minister. “Dear fellow Australian,” full marks for the attempt to imply some sort of camaraderie. It does, however, read like you and he are the only Australians in existence. That might not have detracted too much if I was actually Australian.

I also must give those resourceful folks in Canberra credit for their one genuine stroke of brilliance. They used blue ink in Johnnie’s automatic signing machine. It gives the illusion of a personal touch. It’s a ploy designed to say to people, yes the letter itself is a mere printout but your valiant prime minister personally waded through mountains of paper to sign each and every one.

The booklet is entitled “Talking with your kids about drugs”. You know, I still have nightmares about when my mother talked with me about periods. The last thing I would have wanted to hear as a teenager would have been about her shroom trips as a wayward youth. Of course to be fair in her youth the only shrooms she was likely to have consumed might have been the ones to spring up around her feet-warming cow pats but still.

It includes a helpful list of drugs and their street names. Well, helpful if you’re completely mental anyway. Here’s the problem I have. The type of parents who are likely to use this booklet as a reference for when they decide to approach their offspring are the type who would have no freakin’ clue about drugs or their street names. It’s bad enough hearing Brendan fo’ shizzle his Counterstrike homies. Arch-conservative parents using any of the names listed would be comical at best. At worst it might well drive these poor kids to drugs.

This is all very reminiscent of the anti-terrorism brochure from a few years back. Truth be told I don’t even remember what that said. There’s your tax dollars at work Australia. I do know, however, that it was better than this one. Why you might ask? (Probably not but that’s never stopped me before.) The anti-terrorism one was better because it came with a fridge magnet. It was useful. It gave me something I could use to stick pizza menus to my refrigerator. Now that’s public service. This one’s just a waste of trees and plastic. And possibly plastic trees. Oh, and the electricity too. Please God if you’re reading, make them waste a ton of electricity and suchlike making a brochure about reducing carbon emissions.

Now if you’ll excuse me inspiration calls, I’m off to acquire something illicit.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 29th, 2007 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.