Editorial: The other elephant in Inner Sydney

Editorial: The other elephant in Inner Sydney

How over-regulation creates the problems it seeks to solve

Last week we looked at how banning nearly every activity from our streets in the name of order may actually worsen the monocultural mayhem dubbed ‘alcohol-fuelled violence’.

This week the other elephant in the room ‘ prohibition ‘ takes centre-stage.

Imagine you are a young guy from the suburbs out to meet your mates in a Sydney entertainment precinct. You’ve recently done well in your HSC, made the uni course you wanted, got over that Year 12 love-affair and you’re looking forward to a night out during which, with any luck, you might meet the next love of your life.

Suddenly there’s dog on you and a cluster of ten police have you up against a wall, legs spread and they are slowly stripping you. Your shoes are off, the contents of your bag is all over the footpath and a policeman is peeking into your underpants. The humiliation is mortifying as passers-by look on in horror, especially those backpackers from Europe who can’t believe what they are seeing.

The problem is that joint in your pocket, saved up for later in the evening when the alcohol starts delivering diminishing marginal returns on your level of joy. You get a caution and slink home, your night wrecked.

If you ever return to the scene you’ll get well stoned before you leave and you certainly won’t be carrying. No, what you will do is drink more because that’s the only choice you have.

Multiply this by up to 100 searches a week in each entertainment precinct over several years and it becomes a large enough phenomenon to shift the cultural axis of Sydney’s nightlife towards alcohol. There is no research to back this up of course, because it is all designed to support a different agenda in our information-controlled world.

If you believe all this is justified to prevent the horrors of drug abuse you are misinformed. Any evidence-based analysis reveals that cannabis and MDMA ecstasy ‘ the very drugs the dogs most easily detect ‘ are way less harmful than most things. Around 500,000 people take ecstasy every weekend in the UK, and the tiny incidence of casualties makes it about as safe as taking an international flight.

While prohibitionists beat up the link between cannabis and psychosis, the latest research indicates that only half a percent of the population may be at risk, and that their psychosis would probably happen anyway.

Alcohol, by any measure, is far more harmful, and that’s exactly what drug prohibition is increasing through the well-known ‘balloon effect’ ‘ squeeze one part of the balloon and another part swells up.

But prohibition is rarely questioned in any analysis of our social problems. It’s another elephant in the room that nearly everyone ignores even as it warps our lives in exactly the same way that alcohol prohibition created the speakeasies, Al Capone and the St Valentine’s Day Massacre.

Then, it was less difficult to end prohibition because people remembered a time before it was imposed and knew that life had not in fact been so bad. Now, almost no-one remembers a time before drug prohibition so it’s easier for conservatives to create moral panic.

It damages our society in countless other ways. Between 50 and 80 per cent of crime is ‘drug-related’. Anyone who has been mugged or burgled knows the police rarely even attempt to trace the culprit. Yet most of these crimes are committed by addicts desperate to fund their next hit at vastly inflated black-market prices ‘ prices that make vast, reliable profit margins for the illicit drug industry.

The Australian Crime Authority last year upgraded its estimate of the size of our imported drug economy from a few hundred million to somewhere between $4’12 billion dollars, tending towards the higher figure. That’s an elephant-sized economy run by criminals, untaxed and unregulated, financing other forms of crime including Underbelly-style police corruption and proliferating handguns in our streets.

While the law boasts about its big drug busts and claims it is making serious inroads into drug supply the truth is these raids are just mosquito bites to the elephant, making no difference to supply or street prices. Even some police are speaking out against prohibition ‘ Google ‘Law enforcement against prohibition’ to get a first-hand take on the stupidity of prohibition, one blithely ignored by our media in case it ‘sends the wrong message’. Still, the occasional flash of truth cracks the wall of propaganda when frontline police tell how the ‘happy drugs’ make their jobs easier because those who take them tend to innocent joy instead of the ugly aggression of some drunks.

It is clear that prohibition is a failure. We can’t even keep drugs out of controlled environments like jails, so any idea you might have about the War on Drugs ever succeeding is a fantasy.

But the harms of prohibition are legion. It is filling our jails, those universities of crime. We may be about to privatise two of them, and if recent deals on dysfunctional road tunnels are any indication, there will be a clause guaranteeing the private operators a minimum number of inmates. That is very scary.

Prohibition itself increases the danger of illicit drugs because they are unregulated and people have no idea what’s in them or how much of it.

Prohibition even makes drugs more available to minors than they would be if drugs were legal, taxed and tightly regulated. Kids are starting on drugs younger and younger. A 16-year-old can buy drugs far more easily than alcohol in any town in Australia. All it takes is $20 and a phone call. To get alcohol they have to steal it from mum and dad or convince someone over 18 to buy it for them. Yet prohibitionists constantly claim prohibition protects children. It doesn’t.

The cost you pay for this giant folly is immense. It jacks up your home insurance premiums, makes our streets far more dangerous than they need be, turns addiction ‘ a health problem ‘ into ugly street fallout, and pushes people to drink more. Each sniffer dog costs $90,000 to train, yet the NSW Ombudsman found that over 2,500 searches on public transport produced not one trafficable quantity of any drug.

Meanwhile the dealers swan around in BMWs or on motorbikes and even in police cars, laughing at the surfie getting searched on the footpath, while misinformed straight people keep asking ‘Why don’t they do something about drugs”

As one Kings Cross police commander said: ‘For every dealer we put behind bars, another eight pop up to replace them.’

Meanwhile we live in a city that is a lot uglier, less safe, and drunker than it need be.

You can join a running debate on these issues at kingscrosstimes.blogspot.com.
 

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