up your nose

In recent days two more young Australians have been picked up in Indonesia on alleged drug charges. One, a young Adelaide model, was allegedly in possession of ecstasy tablets for a rave party.

The other, a young male also from Adelaide, allegedly had used heroin syringes and more than 2000 tablets in his possession.

Both Foreign Affairs Minister, Alexander Downer, and his shadow Kevin Rudd have publicly warned young Australians about the dangers of taking drugs to Indonesia or buying drugs there.

In fact, Rudd told me on 3AW that “you would have to have rocks in your head”.  The problem is that young Australians have not learned from the Schapelle Corby case where she faces twenty years in jail. They still still see Bali as a fun place to go where anything goes.

Not so. The new Police Chief is the former head of their drug squad. They do not differentiate between dealers and users. Be it pot or marijuana or heroin or ecstasy. And your dealer could be a Police informer. Even possessing some pot for your own personal use or a couple of ecstasy tablets can put you behind bars for ten or fifteen years.

Or – like in some other Asian countries – it could put you before a firing squad.

The latest news about model Michelle Leslie is that she has actually confessed and signed a statement for Police that she is addicted to ecstasy. That she can’t party without it. Originally she claimed a friend put the tablets in her bag.   Her parents in Adelaide have denied an addiction problem but reports out of Indonesia are that the addiction angle will be part of her defence and that she had sought treatment in  Australia.

I wrote about drugs on my website recently and it prompted this reply from a teenager.

”I just wanted to let you know about the amount of drugs in our schools. I am 15 years old in year 10 in a private school. The amount of people in my year level (even kids in years 7, 8, and 9) who smoke pot and cigarettes. Every lunch time I see the same people go to the toilets going in and smoke all types of s---. It is unbelievable. A few times I go to the milk bar after school and see people not even close to 18 trying to buy smokes. In one case there was one boy trying to bribe the man behind the counter.
Please read this with lots of thought.”

It is not new. Twenty years ago my stepson, Dylan, went to Wesley—the best private school in Melbourne. He was barely thirteen and he told me how he could buy marijuana from dealers who hung around the football field. He didn’t, I hasten to add.

Adults and drugs were also in the news this week. The Herald Sun, on the front page, gave details of a cocaine dealer who had turned police informer. He, apparently, gave police names and evidence implicating singers, TV stars and sportsmen.

He reportedly bought cocaine, huge amounts of it, from Jason, Mark and Lewis Moran who are, of course, all now dead, from the underworld turf war.

Why the names of the celebrity cocaine buyers haven’t come out in the past two years is puzzling. We have had a couple of lawyers identified and people have gone to jail. Surely there is an argument that buyers of illegal substances are as guilty as the sellers.  Without buyers there would be no sellers. Three of the names being bandied around newsrooms are one of Australia’s most prominent male singers, one of television’s best known female faces who has made a living exposing other people and a former AFL champion.

The Herald Sun claimed that some Melbourne nightclubs provide private  cocaine snorting areas for celebrity patrons. It did not name them. Did not name the venues or the celebrity patrons.

I recall going to the opening of a new nightclub in Prahran a few years ago and was surprised when two men and a pretty young woman came out of a cubicle while I was using the urinal in the men’s room.  I, naively, thought that they had been involved in some sexual activity and wondered how three people could fit in there. A more worldly friend explained they had been doing lines of cocaine. Apparently they line it up on the porcelain lid of the cistern. Which sounds pretty unhygienic.  But then ingesting white powder by putting it up your nose sounds pretty unhygienic.

Cocaine was a huge industry in the music business in the United States as far back as the 1970s. Lines of Coke were often an unwritten part of top stars contracts with their music companies.

When I was living there the joke was that cocaine was God’s way of telling people in Los Angeles that they had too much money.

And doctors argue that drugs like cocaine and heroin and ecstasy destroy your brain. There has to be an argument though to legalise them. Too much alcohol can hurt your health. Even kill you. And that’s legal. And the government takes heaps of taxes from your booze bill. Same with cigarettes. And the Government takes billions of dollars in tax from smokers.

I have never snorted cocaine. I couldn’t stand even the physical thing of having something ingested up my nose. Another reason I guess why I didn’t smoke pot in New York in the Timothy Leary years of “tune in, turn on, drop out” is I just didn’t smoke. Pot or real cigarettes.

But there is an argument for all drugs to be legalised. Cut the mafia and other mobsters out. Get GST from the business. Maybe sell them through chemists and make people sign up for rehab sessions. At least it would stop heroin addicts from breaking into your house to steal your video or TV.

Nobody does it because they need a six-pack of VB.

August 28, 2005

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2005