Recently over alcohol and cigars with a group of Greek Australian male peers, the Philippines’ President Rodrigo Duterte’s populist policy of killing drug users which has resulted in a death toll “surging to nearly 3,000” came into the conversation. Some of my cohorts, scotch in hand, applauded the President’s fight against the “scum.” Associate Justice Marvic Leonen in his address to graduates of the Ateneo School of Government stresses the danger of the “folk view of the fundamentals of the political philosophy of liberal democracy.”
My now drunk group sung from the ‘tough on crime’ songbook. I highlighted how Portugal’s decriminalisation of all drugs and harm minimisation policies reduced the rate of HIV infection; youth drug use and criminality. I also pointed to facts like the Ambo Project report in 2014 which shows alcohol as the reason for the majority of drug-related ambulance attendances, with “12,482 attendances in 2013/14 compared to … 1,237 for crystal methamphetamine (ice)”.
Sadly as with all fear-based rhetoric, evidence was irrelevant. Some people fear transgression and difference, such as peasants, the working classes and the petit bourgeoisie, yet liberal democracy needs transgression. As liberal satirist P. J. O’Rourke pointed out in his talk at the Centre of Independent Studies, have we all gone nuts?, “Why do conservatives keep fighting social issues, they’ve lost the war, gay people are getting married and marijuana is legal in many states”.
Many of those that used drugs created great art, dynamic businesses and excellent ideas. Not all the time. Drug abuse can be boringly self-indulgent, or dangerous, but more people die on the roads and from drowning yet neither cars, or swimming have been banned, and we try to teach people to drive and swim.
Ancient cultures, Greeks, Indians, Assyrians, American Indians and Australian Aborigines consumed drugs for religious rituals, creativity and deep reflection. Homer writes of Odysseys’ fall under the spell of the lotus-eaters, Lotophagi, possibly Egyptians who used the lotus, Nymphaea Caerulea, as a euphoric relaxant. Thomas Edison, the American inventor regularly consumed a cocaine-laced elixir, he hardly slept spending much time inventing stuff; Shakespeare’s pipe had deposits of cocaine and marijuana; Alexander the Great introduced opium to Persia from the Middle East. LSD was a watershed for Steve Jobs the man behind Apple Corp, who said that taking LSD was “a profound experience … It reinforced my sense of what was important – creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.”
Some of the greatest jazz musicians of all time were drug users like the innovator, John Coltrane; our own rebetika are songs about heroin and hashish; the Beatles wrote their best work after 1967 on LSD and marijuana; Charles Dickens had an opium habit and Freud, the father of modern psychiatry, was a big cocaine user. Jet fighter pilots have since WWII battled their biggest killer, fatigue, through high quality army issue “amphetamines…that has kept military aviators fierce-eyed and alert from the Battle of Britain to night strikes over Afghanistan.”
The war on drugs rhetoric is about intolerance. Anti opium laws in the early 20th century were about attacking the Chinese not moral or health issues of opium smoking. Jews, Roma, homosexuals and others not fitting the racist Aryan vision of Nazi Germany were commonly associated with moral depravity and drugs.
In Washington DC, in the mid 90s, I found it easier to access quality marijuana, (which of course I never inhaled), from wealthy Georgetown University students, than on the streets. Getting busted for smoking baking soda-cut crack cocaine, which some poor African American men could only access, resulted in hundreds of times harsher sentences than those meted out white professionals busted for cocaine.
We know what Trump thinks of Mexicans; “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” Views by Trump, Duterte, Putin and Pauline Hanson are becoming mainstream at the expense of liberal-democracy. My group was by now plastered, like many white Australians, yet an Aboriginal man or woman as drunk as we were would immediately induce racial scorn.
It takes courage to pursue drug law reform in Australia and most politicians are locked into non-evidence based populisms. We need decriminalisation, regulation, harm minimisation and legal access to good and clean drugs. Just like my drinking cohorts no longer expect to die from moonshine poisoning as many did during alcohol prohibition in the US, be arrested for having a whiskey, shot for buying and or selling alcohol, so those that want a toke, or a line, should not fear mental anguish, imprisonment or death.