AMSTERDAM OF THE SOUTH

Political parties, suggests Christopher Pearson, need to address South
Australia's growing drug problem.

One of the bleaker features of living in a mendicant State is the servile
attitude that Parliament - in this case the South Australian Legislative
Council - takes towards organised crime. That august body has just voted to
disallow a Government-sponsored regulation which would have reduced the
number of marijuana plants its citizens can grow, if not with impunity then
at most with a $150 misdemeanour fine, from 10 to three.

Adelaide has been long a local version of Amsterdam -- a centre for the
production and distribution of illicit drugs. As The Australian's Carol
Altmann recently noted, Sydney has 19 hydroponic suppliers. Melbourne has
13. In Adelaide there are 71, many of them owned by biker gangs. If you are
unemployed, a student or a sole parent, growing dope can reap you up to
$80,000 a year, tax free. In some suburbs the gangs are major institutional
landlords, providing more reliable protection than the police.

One of the advantages of hydroponics businesses is that they can
conveniently launder the money. As well, they provide likely suppliers not
only with the means of production "on tick" but also their only plausible,
albeit parodic, experience of the work ethic. One of the great successes of
the Federal Government's work for the dole campaign has been in pin-pointing
the extent to which unemployment has been both partial and voluntary.

Being the most convenient source of marijuana has advantages for a depressed
regional economy. Individually, it's like becoming a part of what Les Murray
calls "the people's other world". The money is easy and the work and risk
are negligible.

The rot really set in during the Keating era, when interest rates were
around 18 per cent. Middle-aged country people, whose delinquencies had
never stretched much beyond catching a few out-of-season crayfish and who'd
thought of themselves as essentially law-abiding, began growing and selling
drugs they wouldn't want their grandchildren to have anything to do with.
When people who might once have passed for the salt of the earth find
themselves so deeply compromised, civil society begins to unravel very
quickly. Lawlessness and normlessness become the norm.

There can be no doubt about the fundamentals in this debate. Permission to
grow 10 plants at a time, or 40 a year, results in vastly more marijuana
than one person could use. So the legislation connives at trafficking in
drugs.

The State leader of the Australian Democrats, Michael Elliott, led the
charge to disallow the Government's reform regulation. He saw himself as
looting after the interests of "disorganised crime" at the expense of the
drug barons. When ageing hippies are half your constituency, what else can
be expected?

It was a conscience vote and neither the Labor members nor the Independents
and the Liberal who formed an adventitious majority could manage much in the
way of coherent argument. The Government intends to bring the matter to
another vote and I expect that next time, under more searching scrutiny,
there will be a different outcome.

Frances Nelson QC, who chairs the South Australian Parole Board, has been
pointedly telling anyone with ears to hear about the recent spate of
marijuana-related crime. The picture she paints is much less benign than the
class of '68 would allow. Nelson doubts that the category of a "safe drug"
is applicable to something which, especially when combined with alcohol, so
often leads to horrendous violence. There have been too many cases where
psychotic cruelty was plainly drug-related for them to be conveniently
amnesed with soothing nostrums about victimless crimes.

The Legislative Council is elected by a version of proportional
representation. Its members seldom feel the chill wind of popular rage and
can afford a certain insouciance, unlike their colleagues in the Lower
House. Councillors with the buffer of very long terms can allow themselves
the self-indulgences we've come to expect of "the anti-Vietnam RSL".

In the House of Assembly, where issues such as this can quite markedly
affect electoral outcomes, both of the major parties must declare their
hands. The Premier and the Leader of the Opposition must turn this issue of
conscience into a matter of party policy or live with the consequences.