The Aussie culture - whats accceptable

This afternoon, I attended my Community Practice Nursing tutorial and our case study involved a 16 year old boy who has been trying dope and hanging out with the wrong crowd. Putting ourselves in the role of the school nurse, we were told to discuss what some of the issues were and how we would go about handling them. Afterwhich, we discussed alcoholism issues, drunk driving, drug usage, sex education in the schools etc.

The statistics in Australia states that 22% of 12 years olds have never touched alcohol before and 29% 12 year olds have drunk alcohol in the last month.

It also shows that amongst the 17 year olds in Australia, only 5% have never touched alcohol before and 72% had alcohol in the last month.

My classmates (mostly locals) also talked about how one of the nursing interventions as a school nurse in schools when it comes to education regarding sexually transmitted diseases and HIV is providing school age children with free condoms, encouraging safe sex, protected sex. Instead of discouraging school age children from having sexual intercourse, I guess they realise that its so rampant that its not possible to change. or rather, Why the need to change? Hence the giving out of free condoms.

I dont mean to be a prick or a too good for my own good kind of person. But the values that this country has is quite appalling to me. The alcohol consumption here is sky high. Drug usage amongst the youth here is also on the increase.

In my class of future nurses, smoking marijuana in school or smoking to relieve stress was considered socially acceptable.

I spent the whole lesson (2 hours) listening to about the situation at hand, what they thought of providing needle injection rooms (for pple to inject themselves with drugs in a clean environment), needle exchange project, heroin register etc.. i cant get used to it.