HEROIN, COCAINE PART OF OUR PAST

IMAGINE a nation so steeped in drug culture that mothers feed opium to
their babies.

Ready-rolled cannabis joints are available at tobacconists. Cocaine is
sold at the chemist, in tonics and even soft drinks. Doctors regularly
prescribe heroin and protest against any move to ban it.

You are imagining Australia in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

"I hadn't realised what enthusiastic drug-takers Australians are," said
Inara Walden, curator of the Drugs: A Social History exhibition, which
opens at Sydney's Justice and Police Museum this weekend.

As late as the 1930s, Australia had the world's highest legal consumption
of narcotics. Heroin was given to women in childbirth, to cancer patients
and used in cough medicines. When Australia banned it in 1953, doctors
from Lelbourne's Royal Women's Hospital protested to the government.

In 1971, the average Australian was taking three times as many analgesics
as the average Briton.

Before federation, marijuana "Cigares de Joy" were described in
advertisements for lung complaints as "perfectly harmless for ladies,
children and the most delicate patients ... containing no substance capable
of deranging the system".

That was an age, though, when Queen Victoria took cannabis for period pain
and advertisers trumpeted products like the opium-laced Mrs Winslow's
Soothing Syrup for teething children, with the motto: "Depend upon it,
mothers."

"A cup of tea, Bex and a good lie down" was targeted at frazzled housewives
in the 1950s. But the APC (aspirin, phenacetin, caffeine) powders were so
addictive that some women swallowed up to 50 a day and Australia soon had
the world's highest incidence of APC-related kidney disease.

"It's not always the drugs that are inherently bad, it's the way we used
them," Mrs Walden said.

Australians still had a propensity for pill-popping. About 90,000 people
would take three-quarters of a million ecstasy tablets this year in Sydney
alone. And one in three Australians had tried marijuana.

But she points out that Australia has led the world in harm-minimisation
strategies: low-alcohol beer, random breath testing, Quit smoking projects
and free needle exchange. The number of smokers has declined from half the
population after World War II to one in three by 1980 and one in five today.

Tobacco kills 20,000 Australians a year, heroin less than 500. "It's much
harder for people to perceive alcohol and tobacco as damaging because they
have been socially ingrained as recreational drugs for so long," Ms Walden
said.