A fix on every corner
Phillip Adams From: The Australian October 01, 2010
EVERY weekend, in any number of Australian cities, addicts pour onto the streets from the premises of their drug dealers to perpetrate violence upon each other, hapless passers-by and the police.
The statistics suggest a dramatic increase in numbers of these self-destructive junkies, a decrease in their average age and a growing incidence of young women.
Apart from the demands on police resources, our ambulance services and hospital emergency rooms are overwhelmed. As are our coronial officials, given the numbers killed in drug-fuelled brawls. And that’s before we factor in the wreckage of human life caused by crashing vehicles, transforming the streets and highways into wreckers’ yards.
Australia’s most dangerous drugs of choice have famous brand names, with other forms of bottled narcotics fighting for market share. And whereas cocaine, heroin and that comparatively harmless herb marijuana are sold without massive ad campaigns, our drug manufacturing corporations spend hundreds of millions pushing their dangerous, mind-altering and mind-destroying potions on campaigns designed to addict the young.
Cigarette advertising has been long since banned on the telly. But not alcohol. Not while the governments do so well from the proceeds – as they do from gambling, that other personally and socially corrosive addiction. Mind you, if you added up the cost of anti-social behaviour and drink-driving to a state government, perhaps the income wouldn’t offset the costs.
If the brewers and bottlers are the pushers, the pubs are the peddlers. Pouring more grog into clearly drunken patrons – and demanding the right to do so until dawn – so that they can pour into the streets and pour blood onto the footpaths. If it was the piddling amounts of illegal drugs causing the mayhem, the entire law and order system would be imprisoning the companies that supply the stuff and boarding up the pubs.
I write this diatribe to show the immense failure of social policy in regard to licensing laws – and the great hypocrisy of “the war on drugs” with its self-defeating policies of prohibition and interdiction that makes trafficking in heroin and cocaine one of the word’s biggest businesses. The long-lost “war on drugs” has turned entire nations – Mexico, Colombia, Afghanistan and the rest of them – into corrupt factory-farms for drug lords.
I haven’t seen a lot of heroin addicts rioting on the streets of Sydney on Saturday nights. Yet people still fuss over the odd needle-exchange centre. I haven’t seen Newcastle’s marijuana smokers charging the thin blue line in Hunter Street. Perhaps we’d be better off if we encouraged hard drugs to get kids off binge-drinking beer.
Decriminalise drugs, for pity’s sake! Get rid of the biggest failure in public policy since US Prohibition. Treat addiction as an illness, not a crime, and implement campaigns and regulations to minimise self-harm by users. For practice we could rethink alcohol rules and regs – minimising self-harm and harm to others by closing pubs earlier. Newcastle has reduced night-time assaults by 37 per cent by fine-turning pub hours – and the rest of the industry is campaigning hysterically against the extension of this sensible approach. And let’s try imprisoning publicans who sell booze to under-age kids or over-the-limit yahoos. I’d drink to that.
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")