THERE USED TO BE A DROP-IN CENTRE WHERE A BOY DIED SNIFFING AEROSOL. IT COULD HAVE SAVED HIM. Over the road from where a 12-year-old Indigenous boy was found dying in the Coles car park in Alice Springs last weekend, there used to be a night time drop-in centre run by the local Indigenous health service. Trained youth workers would have been there engaging with the local young people. If it had been open, the boy who died might have been saved. He might not even have been abusing inhalants if there was some other option that night, like playing pool or cruising the internet in a bright place surrounded by friends. But the drop-in centre was closed last year by the Northern Territory government. Advertisement Many Indigenous kids are in trouble in Alice Springs and central Australia. They live in two worlds, dealing with unprecedented social change: from Neolithic to postindustrial in just a few generations. Decade after decade their imprisonment rates keep going up, while school attendance keeps going down. If they survive the chronic illness and high suicide rates, they face mental health problems, dealing with substance abuse in their immediate family, community-wide poverty and racism. Their demographic is huge and getting bigger. At the last census, the median age for Indigenous people nationally was 21.8 years, more than 15 years younger than the non-Indigenous population at 37.6 years. But the resources committed to helping this growing group have been reduced. Advertisement In Alice Springs, many of the most marginalised kids are nocturnal over summer. During the day, it’s hot enough to fry an egg on playground equipment. Before the current Northern Territory government came into power, there were a number of youth programmes that operated at night, with trained youth workers who could engage with kids when they were out and about. Sometimes they would just chat and joke, sometimes help the kid and their family with some more complex issue. Now there are none. There has been a rising number of young people abusing inhalants since that time. The Northern Territory government chose to divert money from prevention activities to the child welfare system. The child welfare system was overloaded, but with less prevention, increasing numbers of kids and families need help, further overloading the system. It’s a feed back loop: unless you address the causes, there will always be more and more kids being damaged and needing help. Help at this end of the system is intensive and expensive. $150,000 will pay for a youth programme for a whole remote community for a year, keeping dozens, maybe hundreds of kids engaged. In the welfare system, the same amount will provide a single caseworker who, in the course of a year, will struggle to meaningfully support even a handful of kids with intensive, complex issues. People are looking to see what could have been done to prevent this tragedy. Experience shows the most effective approach is a combination of supply, demand and harm reduction strategies. Central Australia has seen petrol sniffing drop by more than 90% since 2007 with the replacement of unleaded fuel with a low aromatic alternative. This supply reduction was accompanied with demand and harm reduction strategies, with much of this delivered through increased investment in youth programmes, especially in remote Indigenous communities. We found that supply reduction was a necessary but not sufficient response to inhalant abuse, and that once supply was restricted, offering alternative activities addressed some of the causes of the substance abuse. There are a range of substances that kids in our region target to sniff, particularly in Alice, a big town with many shops. Stores are cooperative and play an important role in managing risky substances to stem their availability for sniffing. There is legislative support on the drawing board, which the retailers are looking forward to. With legal requirements for safe storage and sale of inhalants, the rules will be clearer. Such changes might save lives. Sniffing propellants is a risky business. The short high comes with a heavy cost to the brain. Research shows neurons are dissolved by the active chemicals in the aerosol’s propellants, which are hydrocarbons. At this stage, there is no alternative to these hydrocarbons as a propellant, so there is no quick fix available that could render the aerosols safe. But once low aromatic fuel did not exist. Although Unilever, who make most of the deodorants sold in Australia, have stated there is no technical solution on the horizon, they may well be the only ones with the research and development capacity to develop a safer propellant. Such a solution would eliminate this dangerous form of substance abuse and save lives. There will be a Coroner’s investigation into the death of this 12-year-old boy. Beyond the immediate physical causes of his death we hope the Coroner can look what can be done better for the growing numbers of young Aboriginal people in our region to promote opportunity and hope and to prevent the next tragedy.
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 00:22:52 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015