THE REAL DEAL ON DRUGS

A More Honest Approach To The Effects Of Drugs Is Needed Rather Than Simply
Demonising Them, Reports Guy Rundle.

When was it that a dozen or so diverse types of herbs, extracts and pills
first came to be bundled together under the general name and concept of
"drugs"? It goes back as far as I can remember - into the early 1970s. It
probably took hold only a decade before that. After all, heroin wasn't
fully criminalised until the 1950s and marijuana was in the "reefer
madness" period - wild lies about the weed transforming you into an
axe-wielding zombie.

Indeed it was only in the Whitlam era that drug awareness education even
got close to being hip, or on the wavelength of the people it was trying to
reach. The pamphlets and educational films of the '70s pushed the more
rational argument that soft drugs might not do immediate damage and might,
yes, give the illusion of fun for a while.

But they were mere way-stations on the road to the abyss, the absolute
zero, addiction to heroin. The message that one might fall into junkiedom
like the ground opening up beneath you was a potent one - in retrospect it
seems to have held sway over our pre-adolescent imagination.

I still remember one booklet printed on underground newspaper style soft
paper with the wavy, curvy typography of the period. The centrepiece was a
carefully posed picture of a long-haired hippie chick junkie, fit in hand,
lying face-first over an open toilet, a sort of porcelain Pieta. It was
pretty compelling stuff - for most of us, sufficiently gruesome to scare
into straightness - until you actually took some and found they didn't kill
you, and thereafter disbelieved everything you'd ever heard.

For others, it was like a personal invitation to a walk on the wild side ...

Thirty years down the track, an entire generation later, we are still using
fear - to judge by the Federal Government's recent 30 second films noir of
bodybags and teen prostitutes - as the primary method by which we instill
people with a capacity to resist the temptation of mood-altering
substances. No one really knows whether this works better or worse than
other approaches, because no one has really been game to try any other
approaches without having fear as the last shot in the locker.

Obviously we can't continue with that approach for much longer - it's a
bluff long since called. And you could mark the point when the broader
culture shifted to a new attitude to drugs in a single word: Trainspotting.
Irvine Welsh's novel of junkie life in Edinburgh had a circulation
initially confined to a relatively small group of devotees, willing to work
through its dialect and unforthcoming modernist prose, but the movie made
from it took all that had been said about smack over the past decades and
turned it inside out.

You could not accuse the filmmakers of unambiguously glorifying drugs -
there were scenes of fit, life-loving people being reduced to withdrawal in
a squalid flat, the furniture sold for the last hit, there was a baby dead
on the rug, the mother caring only that her boyfriend didn't hog their
latest score, and so on - but nor could you say that they leant heavily on
the gritty squalor.

From the opening scene - Iggy Pop's Lust for Life pumping through the
soundtrack as Renton, the narrator, charges through a shopping street
pursued by cops - to the beatific scene where he overdoses and the ground
opens up to take him (with Lou Reed's Perfect Day playing this time), with
much humour in between, Trainspotting argued that hard drugs were not an
absence of life as the educational paraphernalia had suggested, but a way
of life - high-risk and ultimately destructive, but with its own meaning
and ritual.

It argued that it could be chosen as a way of life, not due to ignorance of
its dark side, but in the full knowledge of it. "If heroin wasn't fun we
wouldn't take it," says Renton. "We're stupid but we're not that stupid."

Trainspotting burst onto the scene at a time when drugs of all description
had crossed a new threshold of public use. Even at the height of the '60s
and '70s social revolution, drug use had substantially remained within the
bohemian-alternative subculture - the subculture had simply expanded. When
the revolutionary content of that subculture had collapsed and the market
rushed in to create a new set of values, the drugs were still there.
Super-strong marijuana was grown in cupboards, cocaine was coming into the
US and Europe in tonnes and MDMA - ecstacy - became the perfect '80s drug,
a mild hallucinogenic high that allowed you to go back to work on Monday.

As laws in the US have become more and more harsh - small-time dope dealers
can get longer sentences than murderers - and as Labor governments, such as
those of Britain or New South Wales, try to control usage with a firm
puritan ethic, the culture pays not a bit of attention. In a world of
ever-expanding choices, drug use is being normalised faster than
governments can re-demonise it.

The gradual insertion of drugs into the broader spectrum of everyday life
looks paradoxical. In fact it is the rule rather than the exception. The
use of substances to alter consciousness is just about our oldest cultural
activity, predating agriculture, and as venerable as other distinctively
human practices, such as art and burying the dead.

From the coca leaf of South America to the peyote cactus to tobacco to
African ibogaine to the Indian poppy - humans everywhere homed in on
whatever was around and bound it into religious rituals. When the
substances also prove toxic they develop a tolerance to its toxicity. When
they are too toxic to tolerate they do the sort of thing Siberian peoples
do - drink the hallucinogen-rich urine of reindeer who have eaten naturally
occurring magic mushrooms. One way or another we find our way to drugs.

Through the imposition of ritual, those peoples who found themselves
surrounded by such plants in relative abundance developed ways of
controlling usage - limiting it to special festivals or to use by the
priestly class. When European conquerers encountered this - after several
hundred years of a type of Christianity hostile to mass rituals of ecstacy
- - they saw only decadence and demonic possession. The effect of drugs is
only partly determined by their chemical nature, the cultural conditions
and expectations of what they will do.

Drugs move from the status of cultural accoutrement to cultural problem the
further they move away from the plant form in which they are found and the
more they become an addiction for export.

Gin replaced ale as a favoured tipple in the 18th century - it was imported
into London by King William and Queen Mary, who had an exclusive license -
and the impact of a distilled rather than brewed liquor was a major
contributor to the squalor and misery of the new urban working class. The
British Empire was founded on selling Indian opium to China at the point of
a gun - and that only blew back in their faces when they couldn't keep it
out of the mother country.

Thomas De Quincy's Confessions of an English Opium Eater is the first
example of the "memoir of derangement" that would culminate in comic and
farcical form with Hunter S.Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Confessions was written around the same time as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
and has a similar fascination with how human beings can be dismembered and
re-assembled by modern life. De Quincy is relating to his visions, torments
and joys as something that he initially controlled, which then got control
of him - as an addiction.

But opium would only produce its dark masterpieces in the 20th century,
following the spread of morphine (from the 1870s on) and then heroin
(developed as a cure for morphine addiction). These are really meta-drugs -
they target the brain receptors explicitly concerned with reducing pain and
thereby enhancing pleasure. Hence the figure of the "junkie" - the
Frankenstein's monster shambling across the modern cityscape, all human
attributes reduced to a single goal, that of the next hit.

It's the image used to terrify people away from experimentation, but, as
William Burroughs noted, it could also be one of addiction's perverse
compensations. There is no need to wonder about what you should be doing,
could be doing, what would make you happy - you know the one thing you need
and want, you just have to get it.

Burroughs's two great books - Junky and The Naked Lunch - are two sides of
a coin, the former a coolly understated journey through the smack addict
nightworld of the 1940s, the latter a surreal treatment of it as a private
and paranoid nightmare.

Burroughs's junky existed in a world that had not fully internalised the
idea of drug addiction as a moral failing - junkies worked their way
through cities, "burning down" (i.e. wearing thin the patience of) doctor
after doctor, chemist after chemist, received regular "hits" in prison,
were treated sometimes as scum, sometimes as mere nuisances. Junky's
unforgettable evocation of a secret world of networks, rituals, codes and
legends, best captured one of the most intractable features of heroin
addiction - that it presents itself as an adventure in a locked-down world
that is, or was, trying to breed conformist organisation people.

By contrast The Naked Lunch - memorably filmed by David Cronenberg -
explores the growing symbiosis of drugs and power. If heroin represents
pure desire in all its contradictory aspects, then the global police will
have the utmost interest in maximising its production and control.

Burroughs argued that heroin reversed the normal process of capitalism -
that smack sold the consumer to the product, rather than the other way
round. Today, the heroin model is taking over. Hyperconsumption,
advertising, marketing and the "brand" keep an overproducing economy going
by speeding up the process in which desires and novelties become needs. To
try and wipe out drugs in a world of $300 trainers is quixotic in the
extreme. Drugs are not marginal to this culture - they're at the centre of it.

There is obviously a need for public education to make people aware of the
extremely dangerous nature of heroin and other opiates, given that they
have a capacity in many - but by no means all - people to become physically
addicted quite rapidly. But the best way to make that clear, especially to
the young, would be to acknowledge that other drugs are more manageable.

The fact that drugs can be not only fun, but give one moments of insight
into self and others that might not otherwise be achieved, needs to be said
if only because everyone realises this as soon as they take their first e.
Only with that genuinely honest approach could the genuine dangers be
underlined - the extremely small risk of an allergic reaction to ecstacy,
the psychologically addictive potential of coke, the risks for
psychologically vulnerable people of some of the stronger strains of dope
currently on offer. Without that shift, the gap between social morality and
the law will widen not narrow, and such a space is one in which corruption
breeds.

As Reefer Madness author Eric Schlosser notes, there are currently 18,000
people in US federal prisons - and many more in state prisons - for
marijuana-related offences, often serving sentences longer than those for
rape and murder. And in Victoria, the entire drug squad has been abolished,
with confessions of officers now revealing how inextricably intertwined
drug production and drug enforcement has been in this state. In the sort of
world we live in, having a "war on drugs" is about as sensible as having a
war on air.

Guy Rundle is a co-editor of Arena Magazine.

BOOKS

Dopeland, By John Birmingham

Australia's gonzo supremo takes a road-trip through Australia's dope
subculture. Confirms every speed-freak's suspicion that the weed will turn
your brain to guacamole.

Junky, By William S. Burroughs

Initially marketed as a pulp fiction shocker, Junky maps the underworld of
the 20th century.

The Naked Lunch , By William S. Burroughs

Written in Tangiers, it records the full paranoia of becoming other than
human - the addict.

Confessions of an English Opium Eater , By Thomas De Quincy

Essayist and friend of the romantic poets, De Quincy started taking opium
to relieve the boredom of a rainy Sunday afternoon in London.

The Money and the Power: Las Vegas and Its Hold on America 1947-2000 By
Denton and Morris

How a Nevada cow town became the crossroads for heroin, the mafia, the
music, the Kennedys, the Cali cartel and the global finance markets.

The Politics of Heroin in South-East Asia By Al McCoy

Before Iran-contra, the CIA set up the golden triangle as an alternative
funding source for the Vietnam war. Five years later Australia had a smack
problem of its very own.

Reefer Madness , By Eric Schlosser

Fast-Food Nation author looks at more corporate pushing: how immigrant
labour, pornography and marijuana circulate in the globalised US economy.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , By Hunter S. Thompson

Drug-addled journo and Samoan attorney fail to cover Indy 500, in
ether-soaked haze of classic American prose.

Trainspotting, By Irvine Welsh

Fin-de-siecle rant sees heroin as tragic but compelling flipside of
consumerism - the alternative that turns out to be the symptom.

TELEVISION

The Sopranos

Tony Soprano's nephew, Chris, who looks like he is in line to lead The
Family has a heroin problem that no one yet knows about, but things will
get ugly once they do.

Six Feet Under

The whole Fisher family experiment, deliberately or accidentally (there is
ecstasy stashed in the disprin jar and Ruth, the mother, pops one by
mistake) with drugs.

FILM

Reefer Madness

1930s cautionary tale of the perils of marijuana, which became a cult movie
on the re-run circuit.

Pure S

Bert Deling's sharp, bleak, grimly funny slice of life from the Melbourne
drug scene.

Drugstore Cowboy

Gus van Sant's junkie road movie, with Matt Dillon, Heather Graham and a
William S. Burroughs cameo.

Wild Innocence

Philippe Garrel's lyrical, haunting story of a film director whose
"anti-heroin" film is financed by a drug deal.

Traffic

Oscar-garlanded thriller made up of interwoven narratives: the movies
shifts between drug czars, drug lords, dealers and users.

Jesus' Son

Alison Maclean's thoughtful, inventive adaptation of Denis Johnson's short
stories, with Billy Crudup as a dazed junkie drifter.

The Naked Lunch

David Cronenberg's striking take on the Burroughs novel of art,
hallucination and addiction.

Another Day in Paradise

Larry Clark's gritty tale of two couples on the road together, fuelled by
drugs and increasingly desperate heists.