In the Senate yesterday, Jacqui Lambie made a heartfelt plea for laws that would allow parents to place drug-addicted children in involuntary detox, revealing that her 21-year-old son is struggling with an addiction to ice.
Unfortunately with my son, what’s happened of the last few years is he started dabbling in ice a few years ago and that’s now gathered momentum and, um, he’s struggling to deal with that – with ice itself and that’s a problem I’m having. Unfortunately, I asked him to leave home about two and a half months ago because things were going missing and there was also – when you’re getting to the point where you’ve got to lock your bag and that up, then I shouldn’t have to live under those conditions. He was becoming erratic and I just – I just had no idea what he was gonna do next. So, for the safety of myself and somebody else that’s in the house, the best thing was to do to ask him to leave.
I can’t help my son because we don’t have any involuntary detox – we can’t involuntary detox them. That’s the first problem I have. So we’ve actually done a private member’s bill. We’ve been working on that for about three or four months with the legislators up here to at least – those people that are adolescents, 18 years and under, so their parents can involuntary detox them in rehabilitation. So that’s what I’m looking after. We’re very, very close to that. The legislators were having a problem, so I went and I did some beg and borrowing from the University of Tasmania. They’ve come into the play and they’ve have been able to find a way around that and hopefully now that bill will be just about ready to go.
Well, I’m opposed to that plan because I can see what the drug does to my son. That’s not my son, that is the drug. These kids that are taking this drug, ice, they don’t have any control. They have very little control over their actions, and the more and more they take of it, the worse and worse it’s getting. They are outta control. And these guys need to have their lives reversed and we need to give them every chance we possibly can and right now we’re not doing that, we’re not throwing everything at them. It’s time for some tough love for our kids that are on this ice and it’s the only way that we’re gonna get through this and we have to stick together and we have to fight it.
