David Penberthy: Our drug habits expose our hipster hypocrisy
WE think we’re ethical consumers but our drug habits have destroyed nations, writes David Penberthy. Think about that as you contemplate a sneaky line on the weekend.
HEARTBREAKING as it all is, there is barely an element to the Cassandra Sainsbury drug-smuggling case that passes the front bar test.
Cassie, like Lindy, like Schapelle, has become the latest female protagonist in that occasional national parlour game of Did She Do It?
I don’t know anyone who thinks the answer is no. Aside from her loyal and shattered family, even those of us who would love to give this 22-year-old the benefit of the doubt struggle to do so based on the evidence.
From a crowded field of flimsiness, several holes immediately emerge with Cassie’s story. The vagueness of her reasons for being in Colombia, with some unsubstantiated reference to a marketing conference, for a company whose identity remains a mystery.
The left-field concept of buying headphones as a thank you gift for your wedding guests, a year out from the big day. The manner in which those headphones were packed, wrapped with so much black tape and weighing so much that you would be immediately suspicious, especially when they had been given to you by a stranger in a Latin American country which for decades has been synonymous with the worst of the international drug trade.
As I said, no-one should wish ill on this poor young girl. Perhaps there is an innocent explanation for all this, but I’m really struggling to find it.
Whenever these cases arise, three things mitigate against public sympathy.
The first is the valid question as to how many lives could have been destroyed if the drugs intended for smuggling had made it to our shores. The second is the naivety of swanning into a country with a proven and upfront record of applying the harshest penalties against drug dealers, and taking the risks regardless. The third is the audacity of following up that mistake by demanding that our Federal Government step in to help extract you from a position of your own making.
It was for these reasons that the Bali Nine struggled to win too much in the way of public support in Australia. There’s no doubting the death penalty is as harsh as it gets, but here we had a group of Australians with enough smack to kill hundreds of people, being smuggled out of a country that has bright yellow billboards at its major airports declaring that Indonesia executes drug traffickers.
And despite those two facts, we saw a sob story campaign mounted on behalf of those nine doomed dealers, framed around the fatuous assertion that it was somehow Canberra’s job to set aside the business of running the country, and mount a lobbying effort on behalf of those who were old enough to know better.
Setting aside the specifics of Cassie’s situation, there is a broader point to be made in the context of Latin America about the west’s moral ambivalence over its role in the creation of an illicit drug industry.
Big countries such as Colombia and Mexico and tiny Central American nations such as El Salvador and Honduras have almost become failed states, purely as a result of the drug trade and the related drug wars between the various cartels.
Mexico ploughs on in a vaguely viable fashion on account of its natural wealth, principally oil and agriculture, and its proximity to the US that makes it one of the world’s leading manufacturing hubs.
But on several occasions in the past few decades this great country almost ceased to function, with the cancer of drug-related political corruption destroying public faith in a number of its governments, and the police and military being more a source of suspicion than reassurance.
To get a sense of the scale of this corruption, one of the most violent of the cartels, The Zetas, was formed after a senior drug gangster member broke away from his old cartel and bribed roughly one-third of the soldiers in the Mexican equivalent of our SAS by quadrupling their pay.
Imagine waking up one day to find a third of the members of your nation’s most elite military fighting force were now privately funded assassins. The scale of all this violence between the rival cartels spilt into the civilian sphere, with more lives lost in Mexico in the past 15 years than in the war in Afghanistan.
Colombia has fared worse, with the power struggles between the Cali and Medellin cartels overlapping and intertwining with a civil war between a Marxist guerilla army and right-wing death squads, both sides of which have at times formed allegiances with the drug dealers.
The tragedy of all this is that countries such as Mexico and Colombia are sophisticated and cultured places that have produced more greater writers and directors and architects than most nations, yet they have become almost exclusively associated with an ultra-violent drug trade.
We should give ourselves a pat on the back for helping them do it. What has happened to these countries is a classic case of supply and demand economics. There are not even close to enough drug users within Mexico and Colombia to sustain these mega-industries.
That’s where the west comes in. We are largely responsible for underwriting this misery. Some years ago the progressive author Naomi Klein penned a book called No Logo, which is like the bible of ethical consumerism.
From T-shirts made in Bangladeshi sweatshops to slave-harvested Guatemalan bananas and African blood diamonds, from Big Tobacco to Big Pharma to Big Sugar, the argument goes that this globalised planet is so intertwined that our behaviour as western consumers keeps nations subjugated and people poor.
I don’t buy all of Klein’s argument but it would seem to be wholly true of the drug trade, yet that is the one industry on Earth where few westerners seem to make this obvious connection.
It’s certainly something people could think about next time they’re contemplating a sneaky line on a Friday night in the dunny of their favourite hipster bar, or worse, contemplating becoming an active player in the drug trade itself, which I sincerely hope, despite all available evidence to the contrary, is something Cassie Sainsbury didn’t do.
David Penberthy is a columnist for the Adelaide Advertiser and The Sunday Mail.