Miranda Devine: Wake up and smell the reality — drugs kill people
The one time Australia got tough on drugs, heroin use dried up and overdoses dropped. Now, drug liberalisers are causing untold damage, writes Miranda Devine. Just look at how marijuana has been normalised in the US.
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“Did Miranda Devine lose the war on drugs?” ran a headline that couldn’t fail to catch my eye. Huh?
This absurd claim is in a new book by freelance writer Antony Loewenstein, with the headline appearing over an extract in the Crikey newsletter this week.
“Devine has been one of Australia’s most vociferous opponents of drug reform for decades,” writes Loewenstein in “Pills, Powder, and Smoke: Inside the Bloody War on Drugs”.
“There’s arguably no public commentator who has been more vocal and at times influential in delaying or stopping drug reforms due to her closeness to the Liberal Party and ability to dominate the news cycle.”
Stop right there.
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Closeness to the Liberal Party, hardly.
Drug “reform” is no such thing. It is legalisation and decriminalisation. It means more people take more illegal drugs and from an earlier age, with all the associated problems, including mental and physical illness, loss of ambition and social dysfunction.
So, of course, I oppose it. Anyone who isn’t off their face would do the same.
In any case the “war on drugs” is a straw man and the drug liberalisers always claim it’s lost.
There’s never been a “war on drugs”.
The closest we’ve come was the short period during John Howard’s prime ministership when he launched the successful Tough on Drugs strategy in 1997 under retired Salvation Army major Brian Watters.
This was a tough love approach which combined tougher law enforcement and interception of drugs at the borders with better rehabilitation options for addicts.
Drug use fell for the first time in three decades, fewer young people experimented with drugs and those who did were older than previously was the case.
The disruption of heroin imports, jailing of drug kingpins, and policing of drug crime in the heroin ground zero of Cabramatta, led to a heroin drought at the end of 2000 which was regarded as unique in the world.
Fewer people died of heroin overdoses and crime rates dropped.
Dr Don Weatherburn, head of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, told me at the time: “The credit for the drop in heroin consumption belongs in the first instance to federal customs and the Australian Federal Police,”
Thus, the success of Howard’s strategy was a real-world rebuke to the drug-liberalisers and criminologists and Greens politicians who claimed that law enforcement attempts to control drug supply are doomed to fail.
The sly abandonment of that strategy by successive governments under pressure from drug liberalisers has been a tragedy. It’s led to a steady rise in drug use, mental health problems, child abuse and neglect, family breakdown and strains on health and emergency services.
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Dr Alex Wodak has probably been the most influential drugs activist in Australia, thanks to his long-term association with prestigious St Vincent’s Hospital, his leadership of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation and collaboration with Ethan Nadelmann, the founder of the New York-based, George Soros-funded Drug Policy Alliance. Wodak was laughed at a few years ago when he advocated selling marijuana in little packets at the post office.
But Soros and Nadelmann have achieved all that and more in the US today. In many American states now under way is a real-world experiment in marijuana legalisation, driven by the profit-seekers of Big Weed.
The smell of weed now wafts through the streets of New York and Los Angeles, but already health authorities are sounding alarm bells.
The multi-billion dollar marijuana industry is reportedly bracing for the backlash, after at least five deaths suspected to be linked to marijuana vaping devices.
Dozens of other people have been hospitalised with lung damage.
US Surgeon General Dr Jerome Adams last month also issued an urgent warning for teenagers and pregnant women that “no amount of marijuana use during pregnancy or adolescence is safe … use during adolescence is associated with changes in areas of the brain involved in attention, memory, decision-making and motivation”.
Adams pointed out that today’s marijuana is three- to five- times more potent than in decades past. “This ain’t your mother’s marijuana,” he said.
He also made the startling announcement that marijuana is now the most commonly used illicit drug for pregnant women, and the third most commonly used drug by adolescents, after alcohol and e-cigarettes.
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In a nation where the sale of alcohol is strictly controlled, it is astonishing to see how quickly marijuana has been normalised.
And yet the evidence of its harms is incontrovertible.
One of many damning long-term studies comes from Sweden where 50,465 Army conscripts were found to have 2.4 times the risk of schizophrenia which, if they tried marijuana by age 18, than those who had never used the drug. Heavy users were 6.7 times more likely to be admitted to hospital for schizophrenia.
Marijuana is not a harmless drug, especially for the developing brain.
This is just some of the evidence I have cited in columns opposing drug “reform” and which I provided to Lowenstein when I did him the courtesy of responding to questions for his book, in which I get 33 mentions. I should get royalties.
He says he wants a “healthy, safe, and legal recreational drug market”. But evidence and observation show that illegal drugs are neither healthy nor safe, and a lot of people will get hurt in the legalisation experiment.
The only way Lowenstein could think of to win the argument was to shoot the messenger, dismissing my evidence as the ravings of a “puritanical Catholic who loathed the changes in modern society”.
I won’t return the insult, despite ample ammunition.
All it does is show the threadbare nature of his case.
Originally published as Miranda Devine: Wake up and smell the reality — drugs kill people
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