Drugs, Fun, Death and Politics

A Story by BenjiPK

An article from March of 2016, regarding the introduction of pill-testing kits at music events (or lack thereof).

The trendy thing to do right now is get righteously exasperated at the close-mindedness and ignorance of politicians and police who won’t allow teenagers to check if their pingers have cyanide in them at music festivals. And of course it has repeatedly been said (and rightly so) that drugs and entertainment will never be separated, drugs will never cease to be fun, and the sane and humane thing to do is allow recreational (or habitual) drug users to use pill-testing kits to check whether the hot little item in their hands will make them love their fellow human like never before or pull out their own eyeballs in a crowded emergency room.

And don’t even get me started on the lives that could be saved if kids weren’t scared of naming loudly and proudly the chemicals they may have taken. I recall two young people passing away after an overdose of GHB in Sydney Park a few years ago; young people who could potentially still be alive had it not been for the crowd of glow-stick wavers and police who made it impossible for the ambulance to reach them in time. Some were under the impression that the paramedics had the power to arrest them for overdosing, or for supplying drugs to the unfortunate pair. Some were arguing with police. Some were seemingly trying to dance and hug the dying party-goers back to life. All scenarios tragically stupid and entirely avoidable.

It also falls under the category of fairly-bloody-obvious that drugs being illegal does not make them safer - that wholesale drug dealers are both protected and made in to billionaires by those who proclaim to be tirelessly fighting against them. So too that the banning of certain substances from public consumption has historically had little to do with public health and safety and more to do with questions of revenue. Marijuana was made well and truly illegal in the USA back in the 1930’s with the help of a smear campaign conducted by one William Randolph Hearst, a man with significant interests in the timber industry, whose goal was to convince the public (or at least the necessary powers that be) that the evils of ‘reefer-madness’ and cannabis-crazed Mexican hooligans far outweighed any potential benefits to be found in using hemp as a sustainable and inexpensive resource for the manufacturing of paper (among numerous other things).

Don't believe me? Watch Family Guy.

As with so many things, our unwillingness as a species to acknowledge (let alone learn from) the errors of our past has ensured very little significant change since then.

Except for in Portugal, of course, where in 2001 the government decriminalised the consumption and possession of any substance - yep, ANY and EVERY currently illicit substance that a human may choose to enjoy - and in 2009 declared the experiment a success, going so far as to contribute an earnest endorsement of the change in policy to the U.N.’s World Drug Report, thus suggesting other governments consider following suit.

"The impact in the life of families and our society is much lower than it was before decriminalisation," said old mate Joao Castel-Branco Goulao, Portugal’s so-called "drug czar" and president of the Institute on Drugs and Drug Addiction, quoted in a 2009 article in TIME magazine. Goulao elaborated that as a result of Portugal’s drug-addicts (of which there are many) having their problems with addiction recognised as just that - not as crimes to be punished but as problems to be remedied - the positive snowball effect has been significant.

Drug use has not risen. Problem users or drug addicts are now able to access more effective medical treatment for their addictions, as well as stable employment and accommodation with the help of incentives offered by government bodies. Police have been able to focus energy and resources on bringing down ruthless and murderous narcotic cartels, rather than on arresting and imprisoning their victims.

So, all good things there it would seem. Portugal has roughly 11 million people living in it, Australia roughly 18 million. Similar size population, similar levels of drug use percentage-wise. I am admittedly ill-informed at best regarding exactly what constitutes an effective drug policy but it would seem to me, after taking this information in to account, that the best course of action, for our country and many others, is a foregone conclusion.

The burning question in my mind, however, is this - why do they even care?

I mean it. Surely, if the stance of those railing against the idea of pill-testing kits at music events or anywhere else is “just don’t take it, just say no, the only way to be safe is to not do the drugs, we will not normalise narcotics”; if they are indeed, as the old conservative cliché goes, “waging a war on drugs”, aren’t dead drug users, by that logic, just an unavoidable reality? Sad but necessary collateral damage? Perhaps even, through a very twisted logic, proof positive that their recommended approach to life is the only safe one?

I don’t know exactly why that bloke we call Premier Mike Baird and all his mates don’t want pill-testing kits at music festivals, but I am willing to bet a large sum of money that their reasons have close to zero to do with the safety of drug-users, party-goers and young people in general while having more than a little to do with keeping their job titles unchanged.

How many fatal heroin overdoses occurred this week in Sydney? The answer is plenty. Stop by the Wayside Chapel in Kings Cross some time and ask the staff how many funerals have been held this week - any week of the year. I can almost promise you that the answer will never be “None”. But, until an annual bundle of official statistics, figures and reports on the number of drug-related deaths is released to the Daily Telegraph, and then only if the information is deemed news-worthy, these premature deaths will not be found on the front page, or the twenty-third page for that matter, of any mainstream newspaper.

In a social media response to a report on the drug-related death of a young, wealthy, Eastern Suburbs private school girl one New Year’s Eve, a Sydney rapper named N-ter wrote that, in his hometown of Hurstville, a fatal drug overdose is commonplace enough to serve as idle pub conversation, not front page news. A friend of this writer had to call an ambulance to his apartment in Waterloo several days ago after two people in his lounge room suffered potentially fatal heroin overdoses within 4 minutes of one another. A source from Redfern’s public housing told this writer of an 18 year old boy being beaten to death over a $25 crystal-meth debt last week.

Smelly drug addicts slumping over in Marrickville fire escapes never to awaken are apparently just not as sexy or sympathetic to most as a 17-year old Rose Bay supermodel-to-be with the innocent eyes of an angel, swallowing one $35 pill too many at a neon-drenched event in Darling Harbour which cost her parents $172 a ticket. And when the very powerful and the very rich see their children in potentially life-threatening danger, it seems no expense is too great, no measure too overprotective, not even the front page of their city’s newspaper is out of reach if it will achieve everything short of actually solving that great festering dilemma that is dead children who could have been saved.

I must reword my earlier thought. The real burning question in my mind is this - why does anybody think they care?

Benji (PK Crew)

14/03/2016