Drugs

An anthology dedicated to the transnational history of psychedelic drugs and culture seems a timely enterprise. We are twenty or so years into what has become known as the ‘psychedelic renaissance’, the global revival of interest in compounds such as LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin centring on their use alongside psychotherapy as treatments for a growing number of mental health disorders.

In his 1927 essay ‘On Being One’s Own Rabbit’, the British-Indian scientist and writer J.B.S. Haldane surveyed the history of an enduring but contentious approach to scientific discovery: self-experimentation. At the age of eight, Haldane tested poison gases on himself in his scientist father’s home laboratory. As an adult, among other self-experiments occasioning losses of consciousness from ‘blows on the head, from fever, anaesthetics, want of oxygen and other causes’, he once induced sufficiently high levels of oxygen saturation to suffer a violent seizure and the crushing of several vertebrae. 

When it was reported in 2005 that nine Australians had been arrested in Bali on charges of trafficking heroin, the public response was scornful and incredulous. In the wake of the media saturation of Schapelle Corby’s trial, such blatant attempts to flout the severe drug laws of Indonesia, with quick cash the only apparent incentive, seemed incomprehensible. As the story filtered through the press, a division appeared in ‘The Bali Nine’, as they were swiftly dubbed, between the mules – Martin Stephens, Renae Lawrence, Scott Rush and Michael Czugaj – who were apprehended with more than eight kilograms of heroin strapped to their bodies, and other members of the group, most of whom had not left the country before. These were Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, identified as the ringleaders of the operation, and Matthew Norman, Si Yi Chen and Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen, who were arrested in their hotel room with more than 300 grams of heroin. The mules claimed that Chan and Sukumaran had made repeated threats against their families should they not co-operate; and that they and Matthew Norman were innocent victims of an international drug-trafficking ring.

The current legal regime for the regulation – I use the term advisedly – of drugs has many unintended consequences. One of its minor tragedies is the number of thinkers and activists whose valuable energies are thus diverted to the Sisyphean labour of undoing it. So many words have now been written on the failure of prohibition that there is surely little more to be added. More than a decade ago, former Senator Peter Baume expressed it well: ‘Our strategies seek to prevent the production of certain designated illegal substances, and fail to do so; they seek to prevent the importation of substances, and fail to do so; they seek to prevent the distribution of substances, and fail to do so; they seek to prevent the sale and use of substances, and fail to do so.’ Instead, our laws and policies make all these activities that much more dangerous, more corrupt, more poisonous and more destructive.

The failure of the current system of drug prohibition was evident right from the start. Quong Tart, tea importer, socialite, lacrosse champion, and indefatigable anti-opium campaigner, insisted that banning its import would ‘stamp out the evil within twelve months’. That was in 1894.

A gap of eight years is a big slice in a writer’s life: at the end, a changed man speaks in a different context. Al McCoy’s Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (1972) and his Drug Traffic: Narcotics and Organized Crime in Australia (1980) have the same publisher and the same villain, but they are very different books.