A LOCAL LOOK AT NATIONAL NEWS

The damage done

A friend of mine, then in his early twenties, once had the experience of answering the door of his Chippendale sharehouse to be confronted with an angry landlord demanding to know where that month's rent was. He answered, truthfully, that he'd handed over his portion of it to the couple he was sharing with the day before and went to their room to investigate. There was no response to his knocking, so he let himself in and discovered two corpses and some bloody syringes. His flatmates, not much older than he, had blown the rent money on a smack binge, accidentally or possibly deliberately ODing. My friend, who'd only recently moved in and barely knew the deceased, had to contact various relatives to inform them their son or brother, daughter or sister had died.

I think of my mate's now long-dead flatmates whenever the topic of decriminalisation comes up, which it does with monotonous regularity as the War on Drugs rolls into its fifth decade. Would things have turned out differently if they'd got the heroin from a pharmacist rather than a bikie? Would they have survived if they'd shot up in a legal injecting room? Were they just young, reckless and unlucky, or were they determined to piss their lives up against the wall by whatever means necessary, causing misery for everyone foolish enough to care for them?

For anyone with a scintilla of life experience and a skerrick of intelligence, the questions thrown up by drug decriminalisation are equally abstruse. Not even conservatives much bother to pretend anymore that the War on Drugs has been any more successful than the War on Alcohol was in Prohibition-era America. Nonetheless, there's no easy answer to the question they go on to pose: What actually happens once the State sanctions – even if only with a nod and a wink – drug use? Granted, what's played out in places such as Portugal and the Netherlands suggests that prohibitionists' fears of Australia's citizenry turning en masse into a pack of Ice-addicted drug fiends is unlikely to come to pass, but given the heavy toll legal intoxicants, notably alcohol, already take on individuals, families and society as a whole, how wise is it to be adding
a plethora of options for turbo-charged self-destruction to the menu?

There's zero chance of the embattled Julia Gillard kickstarting a divisive debate about drugs, so once again the nation's political class (and those who elect it) will be spared the heartache of having to think deeply about how to sensibly manage mankind's hankering for chemical-fuelled oblivion. Meanwhile, somewhere in Australia today, someone will be discovering the track-marked body of a flatmate, friend, child or sibling and wondering if things could have turned out differently.

Nigel Bowen