I grew up in a rural town in NSW and we kids had hardly ever heard of hard drugs let alone ever having been offered any. At best, all we knew of them was that it was an overseas problem and that there were strange opium dens up in Asia somewhere.

We were never warned about drugs in primary and secondary school as there weren't any - with the exception of cigarettes, which some kids tried down behind the school toilet block but that was more a defiance of authority than a real problem. Drugs were never the topic of conversation amongst us at school.

The first time I came across discarded needles and syringes was quite some years later when I was walking around the Colosseum in Rome. It was a bit of a shock to see them in such a renowned place.

I am forever grateful that we kids grew up in such innocence of drugs (that wasn't true of other dangers however).