ROLL THEM, BUT DON'T INHALE

Getting Away With Getting High

FIRST, a confession, I got high in the 1970s - on heated rollers. It
was the night of my boyfriend's end-of-year school dance and I'd
decided to curl my hair, using electric rollers I'd been given the
previous Christmas and hadn't used since.

Instead of diluting the setting lotion, I poured the lot in and
remained hunched over the fumes in a tragic attempt to coax my hair
into a frothy facsimile of Farah Fawcett Majors's.

Pretty soon I was feeling giddy and seeing dots. I looked in the
bathroom mirror and ran outside to my older brother, fixing his panel
van with the wave motif (sorry for the style crimes, but it was the
'70s) and cried: "My eyes are funny!" He took one look and laughed:
"You're stoned"

"But I still go to churchl" I cried, and burst into
tears.

This is not, I admit, the raciest of youthful anecdotes about getting
out of it. But it puts me in thick with a growing cadre of politicians
who, like virtually everyone else who was a teenager in the 70s or
80s, had encounters with nefarious substances but who, unlike
virtually everybody else who was a teenager in the 70s or 80s, hated
the experience.

The latest fractured confession comes from Victorian Opposition Leader
Steve Bracks, who this week admitted he had smoked marijuana while at
university, after calling on the Kennett Government to do more to
combat Melbourne's heroin problem.

"I think most university students of my generation gave it a go, but
it really didn't do much for me." said Bracks.

Bracks has a soul sister in NSW Opposition Leader Kerry Chikarovski,
who said during the last NSW election campaign she had had "a couple
of goes of marijuana when I was at uni, and enough to make me realise
this was not the sort of thing I liked to do". (Chikarovski opposes
any relaxation of drug laws.)

Even Generation X-ers aren't immune from the verbal contortions of
trying to get away with getting high. Last December, Democrats Senator
Natasha Stott Despoja admitted she had tried the weed, and invoked a
defence almost as surreal as Bill Clinton's: "I have tried marijuana
but I don't take drugs."

Clearly, in an attempt to appear hip and contemporary, politicians no
longer resile from offering up an inventory of their past
peccadilloes. At the same time, the vast majority are still slaves to
the high Victorian values that seem eerily natural to John Howard, a
reformed cigarette smoker who recently backed the posh Sydney ladies
college that expelled nine students for smoking joints.

(Though Howard asserts zero tolerance, he has yet to act on Amanda
Vanstone's suggestion, made in 1990, for on-the-spot urine testing of
MPs to set a good example for drug-free workplaces. Yet the spectacle
of the Justice Minister hauling the Prime Minister out of Question
Time to give an impromptu sample is an Idea that definitely has merit.)

Though it is probably true that most under-45s have smoked marijuana,
most politicians instinctively duck from any suggestion they are going
soft on drugs. Politicians will be caught in a bind over this so long
as they continue to hold themselves and others to fraudulent moral
standards.

In the US, it is said the Lewlnsky scandal ushered in new
sub-standards of behaviour by public officials from the President
down. But the lineage of Clinton's "I didn't have sex with that woman"
defence surely began with the barefaced fib, "I didn't inhale".

The media have a lot to answer for here: there is no reason to suppose
journalists are less given to recreational drug-taking than anyone
else, yet the tabloids are almost hysterical in their response to any
politician's admission of having flirted with any substance stronger
than whisky, or to any drug reform.

The furious opposition by some to the news that some nuns are to open
the country's first safe injecting room for heroin addicts in Sydney
is one case in point; another is the potential of a feral US media to
destroy George W. Bush's presidential ambitions because of rumours
that he took cocaine and marijuana in the distant past.

Jeff Kennett is perhaps the only prominent Australian politician to
consistently defy media expectations about where to stand on
conscience matters such as drugs. Once, with a posse of hacks in tow,
he stopped outside a Melbourne shop called Smoke Dreams, with bongs in
the window. "I didn't know what they were until my son gave me one for
Christmas," he said. Asked why his son had given him a bong, he
reportedly replied: "I put a camellia in it."

In 1996, rather than make a hash of a public confession, Kennett
called for the decriminalisation of marijuana and revealed that his
children had taken the drug. He didn't get his way on the former, but
has implemented other drug reforms with a confidence that makes other
politicians seem lame.