Source: Australian, The (Australia)
Contact:  http://www.theaustralian.com.au/
Pubdate: 14 Nov 1998
Section: Review, Page 32
Author: Phillip Adams

SAY NO TO DRUGS CANT

BEATING their pectorals like so many Johnny Weissmullers, the
powers-that-be announced a seizure of heroin that was valued, at the very
least, at a squillion, trillion, zillion dollars. And climaxing the orgy of
self-congratulation was a buffoon of a minister saying that umpteen kids
would be "saved from overdose deaths". Piffle. Twaddle. Tosh. Bulldust.

Instead of parading so proudly up and down the wharf beside his ship of
shame, the minister might as well have lowered a bucket into the ocean.
Then he could have hauled it up and told the assembled media: "In seizing
this salt water I have saved a number of people from drowning."

Heroin seizures change little. Oh, they might affect the street prices for
a while. They might change the market share in narcotics, briefly boosting
the sales of, for example, cocaine, but that's about it. The quantity
seized is but a skerrick of the quantity missed. And it's not as if there's
a fixed, finite amount of heroin in the world. Any shortfall in this
market, or any other, will promptly be filled from the vast amount that's
readily available.

As ideologues are forever reminding us, we live in an era of deregulation.
Yet conservative governments spend vast amounts of money attempting to
regulate the flow of drugs deemed illicit. Of course, over 90 per cent of
drug deaths in this country are caused by tobacco and alcohol - not only
legal but major sources of government revenue.

In the US, there are growing battles, waged in public policy and the
courts, on the tobacco industry. While we copy so much from the US,
including our deranged policies on illicit drugs, nothing happens here. But
we slavishly follow the US in its approach to heroin. With the same
spectacular lack of success.

The arguments are as familiar as the wallpaper. Prohibition and
interdiction don't work. There is no evidence, anywhere, that interdiction
has done much to slow the importation of drugs, let alone eliminate them.
On the other hand, draconian policies have helped corrupt the police forces
and filled the jails, and have turned sick, sorry and sad children into
criminals.

The Americans were prohibiting alcohol from the 1830s. They were still at
it in the 1930s. The record suggests it wasn't wildly successful. Indeed,
whenever grog was illegal, it encouraged the production of hooch, and
handed to an Al Capone a highly profitable enterprise. About the only thing
we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.

Heroin? Why focus on heroin? We live in a country that, following US
example, still gets its knickers in a twist over marijuana. As the
admirable Rick Farley observed when running the National Farmers
Federation, marijuana has been one of our larger cash crops for generations.

Imagine going to the electorate for a mandate on the following policy, "As
prime minister, I promise legislation that will be utterly and entirely
counterproductive. I promise that hundreds of millions of dollars will be
deflected from areas of desperate need, like health and education, and
utterly wasted. These laws will also ensure unprecedented levels of robbery
while giving your children criminal records. At the same time, I promise
the laws will channel vast amounts of money to local and international
criminals - while providing generous bribes for members of the police
force. At the same time, we will not shrink from filling our jails to the
rafters with people who are, by and large, just mildly naughty. Not to
mention ill. And instead of spending money on educational programs we will,
through our pious expressions of disapproval, aid and abet a sub-culture
that thrives on official and parental hostility."

Mightn't that be just a little harder to sell than the GST? Yet the
Australian public has been sold this preposterous package for years - by
every prime minister in living memory.

Nobody believes in this 'war on drugs' for a moment. The pollies know it's
nonsense. As do the official agencies. As do the judges who are sick of
sending children to jail. As does the medical profession, which knows that
furtive needle-sharing produces a vector for serious and often fatal
illness. Not even the pundits and shock-jocks who feign horror every time
there's a modest suggestion for reform take themselves seriously. Everyone
runs around like headless chooks the moment anyone suggests there just
might be an alternative approach. But there is one group that is
wholeheartedly behind the drug laws and the drug wars. They are the drug
lords and the drug pushers. Because the laws guarantee them their markets
and their mark-ups.

The only drugs you can begin to control are those that are legal. Then
their quality, their distribution, their packaging, their pricing and
availability can be monitored and controlled.

Increasingly, the US approach to drugs is being ignored in Europe. There,
at least and at last, people are facing the facts about the drug culture.
Namely, that it's an immense, permanent part of the social landscape. Oh,
the menu may change from time to time, one drug gaining in popularity. But
nothing is going to stop people using them, any more than censorship will
stop people thinking naughty thoughts.

Australians follow the Americans as closely, as devotedly, as a pimple on
the bum. You see it in our popular culture, where out of every $100 spent
at the box office, well over $90 goes to US film. Our television
programming also evokes the American posterior, the relationship close to
that of a colonic polyp. Should the Americans show the slightest interest
in waging a war, an Australian prime minister will be the first to phone
the White House proffering cannon fodder. But not even our support for wars
is comparable to our enthusiasm for these endlessly declared wars on drugs.
Here we are grovelling, abject, uncritically accepting, formidably foolish.

Mind you, it's not just the authorities who embrace the US approach to
drugs. It's the users themselves. The vernacular of drug users,
energetically promoted in music and movies, is utterly American. You'd
expect that from impressionable kids. But does that mean the grown-ups have
to be as silly? As suggestible? As unoriginal?

But perhaps we're not taking it far enough. Perhaps we should be even more
inspired by the US example. Oh, we've got a few drug wars raging between
bikie gangs. But we really aren't having enough drive-by killings. And
while some of our politicians are going for "three strikes and you're in"
legislation or "no tolerance policing", we're dragging our feet when it
comes to reintroducing capital punishment. Let's electrocute young junkies.
Let's fry them. Or, more appropriately, let's knock them off with fatal
injections. And while we're doing so, let's continue to encourage senior
members of our business community to sit on the boards of the big companies
that flog grog and tobacco. Because why bother with just one gross
hypocrisy when we could have two or three others? 
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Checked-by: Mike Gogulski