Chronik Fatigue
Ex-Bluelighter
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- Sep 23, 2005
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I begrudgingly bought a copy of The Bulletin this morning to read on the bus and was stunned to find this article. I was shocked enough to find something even worth reading in its glossy pages, but this?!?! I'm speechless. I am beyond speech!
The Bulletin
High time to face facts
Thursday, September 6, 2007
Waging a moral war on society's love affair with drugs is not the fix.
Like most of society's "demon" drugs, Ecstasy was first produced in the laboratories of a pharmaceutical company. The German firm Merck reportedly synthesised the drug as far back as 1912, while searching for a way to reduce bleeding.
Since prohibition in the 1980s, manufacture has moved to less formal digs, like the nondescript brick home in Broadmeadows that was formerly headquarters for Melbourne drug boss Carl Williams. Sadly, the so-called hug drug produces fear and paranoia in those involved in its manufacture, hence the security cameras and steel roller shutters on all the windows. The battle for control of the ecstasy market in Melbourne cost dozens of lives, all of them arguably a consequence of the prohibition on party drugs.
Sitting in his kitchen, Carl's father George can scarcely believe that a little pill could have produced so much trouble. Certainly, making ecstasy is far more dangerous than taking it, judging from the body count in the underworld war, he says. The War on Drugs, by any measure, has completely failed, if NRL star Andrew Johns' experience is any guide.
Moreover, three years after Carl Williams punched out his last pill, ecstasy supply is still increasing dramatically. Add to that the boom in crystal methamphetamine (ice) and the futility of the war on drugs becomes apparent. It's a war on our kids marked by hypocrisy, says Williams.
"The kids just don't believe what they are being told. They know it's (ecstasy) not killing them, no matter what the police and authorities say," he says.
It's indisputable that every year in Australia the death toll from alcohol is three times that of illicit drugs. So why has the Federal Government this year committed $150m to battling amphetamines, when it spent just $5m to fund bodies like Drinkwise, an industry government initiative aimed at changing Australia's drinking culture?
The biggest drug pusher in society is of course government, which rakes in nearly $8 billion in annual revenue from excise and taxes on alcohol and tobacco. However, state and federal governments have traditionally committed less than 10% of that revenue to fixing the harms legal drugs create.
The disproportionate response to amphetamines reflects a moral panic against drugs, rather than a measured response to their observed health risk.
Johns' confession that he regularly consumed and enjoyed ecstasy over 10 years confounds the moral army. That he could play sport at the highest level and still enjoy his guilty pleasure underlines what millions of ravers and party goers already know. Ecstasy rarely kills you and is more habit forming than addictive.
Compare the ravages of alcohol and say it ain't so. Johns' battle with booze would have barely rated a mention were it not for the accompanying drug use.
British philosopher David Pearce, in his essay Utopian Pharmacology: Mental Health in the Third Millennium, summarises the E-experience and its attractiveness: "At MDMA-driven raves … women can feel safe in public, gay people feel truly at ease, and sexually straight or bisexual clubbers can express love and affection for each other free from overt or internalised homophobia. Taboos on touching and the whole gamut of tactile experience are relaxed. The body no longer feels like a prison for the soul but an extension of it ... MDMA promotes intimacy, warmth, and an empathetic sense of other human beings as fellow subjects rather than objects."
Little wonder that a high-profile star like Johns, role model to millions of budding footy thugs, would relish an escape from his macho, Darwinian world to this one. Millions have followed the same path.
Californian psychedelic chemist Sasha Shulgin was the first to describe his clinically controlled experiments with MDMA in 1976.
"I feel absolutely clean inside, and there is nothing but pure euphoria," he wrote. "I have never felt so great or believed this to be possible. The cleanliness, clarity, and marvellous feeling of solid inner strength continued throughout the rest of the day and evening. I am overcome by the profundity of the experience..."
This was the early promise of MDMA, at least in the lab. To psychotherapists, higher forms of MDMA could bring an end to the NRL-like "survival of the fittest" mindset of human beings. Under its influence, it seemed jealousy, envy and rage could be subdued. In the underground intellectual circles where MDMA flourished in the late 1970s, it took users to a new Eden, hence its original name; Adam. Then criminalisation took MDMA into the underworld, just as alcohol prohibition had created the "golden" age of gangsters in Chicago of the 1920s.
Prohibition took alcohol out of the labs into backyard stills and history has repeated itself with MDMA. A Crown witness in a string of gangland cases described how, with a guinea pig, he had experimented with producing ecstasy from a battlefield anaesthetic called ketamine.
"[The guinea pig] took it and within five minutes he was in a paralysed state and could only mumble. I thought I had killed him…He was still out of it and dazed for about five hours later," he said. Remarkably, once the shivering and convulsing ceased the guinea pig reported that he actually felt pretty good.
If this all sounds like a marketing pitch for the benefits of drugs, then you miss the point. Rather than feigning shock and disappointment at new revelations of drug taking, it's time our leaders acknowledged the deeply entrenched role that drugs play in society (and always have). It's worth remembering that the arrival of empathogens like ecstasy led biochemists and psychiatrists to speculate on a new era of mental health where the human psyche could be re-tooled. The old Darwinian mindset would be obliterated leading to an improbable era of world peace. Love would last forever and sexual jealousy could be treated like a head cold. The problem with E-love it lasts only till the pill wears off, replaced by a nameless anxiety and depression.
Science, even despite the prohibition of MDMA, is still moving towards this goal.
The Utopian Pharmacology paper predicts that "faster, cheaper and safer designer-drugs and drug-and-gene-combos should in principle be accessible to everyone within 15-20 years".
"The design of E-like hug drugs, love drugs and euphoriants, and perhaps later the genetic programming of E-like waking consciousness, could be just the beginning of a whole new genetic and chemical cornucopia for mature post-Darwinian life."
The highs of top level sport and the adoration of millions was not enough for Andrew Johns. He reflects the scientific belief that homo sapiens (even celebrity versions) for all their comfort and learning are fundamentally no more happy than their rock hopping, cave dwelling ancestors. Like singer Huey Lewis in his 1983 hit "I Want a New Drug" they are still looking for empathy without anxiety.
"I want a new drug
One that won't make me nervous
Wondering what to do
One that makes me feel like I feel when I'm with you
When I'm alone with you."
But when that drug/gene combo is available, will the moral army demand its prohibition? If so the backyard chemists and gunsmiths will stand ready to supply the demand.
