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By the long weekend at the end of January the whole family had returned from the farm. It had been a busy weekend, with two surf carnivals, the Colonial Day at St Patricks College and the Australia Day ceremony at Manly Council chambers. We were relaxing at home on the Monday night when I received a phone call from Manly Police: my son Peter had been arrested on a drug charge.  

Our third child and first son, Peter had always been shy and introverted. His troubled schooling had been punctuated by emotional outbursts -- he did not fit into the system and refused to conform. At his own insistence, he stayed on to complete high school; and then dropped out a few days before the final exams. Now nineteen years old, he had been unemplyed for more than a year.

"You had better come down", the station sergeant said, "your boy is in a bad way."

Willie, Gabby and I hurried down to Manly in the Commodore and parked outside the police station. We found Peter inside: a dark figure slumped in a cell behind the charge room.  

He had apparently consumed a large quantity of pills -- a potentially lethal micture of "uppers and downers", bringing on a comatose state which seemed to be worsening. The police had noticed him staggering along Pittwater Road. They had found remainder of the pills in his pockets, and had charged him with

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