Party time in Canberra, the country’s most party-challenged town

Not everyone has the sophisticated junkie’s discipline to enjoy hard drugs in moderation, however, writes Steve Waterson.

The drive from Sydney to Canberra must be one of the most depressing trips on this continent. It’s not so much the landscape, although the view from the highway is tedious until Lake George – then it becomes monstrous, with giant windmills mutilating the skyline and passing birdlife.

But those eyesores are sprouting all over the Australian countryside, as fast as Chinese toddlers and slave labourers can weld them together. So if it’s not the journey, it has to be the destination, which bleeds the joy out of your soul as you draw closer, picturing its sanctimonious cyclists, featureless avenues, anodyne architecture and too-long traffic lights.

When my younger daughter finished her studies at ANU I was thrilled to think my visits would be much less frequent, particularly since the federal politicians who bat their eyelids at press gallery journalists refuse to speak to me. Apparently some of the lickspittle parasites believe I have on occasion been disrespectful towards them.

Fine, I thought, from now on I’ll just be making the usual quarterly run to Fyshwick to load up the transit van with pornography and fireworks, when a startling announcement from the ACT politicians’ collective made me and my patched comrades in our North Shore bikie gang jump to attention and modify our business plan.

Aerial of Lake Burley Griffin and Telstra Tower at sunset. Picture: Getty

Class A drugs decriminalised? Are you kidding? Party time in the country’s most party-challenged town! The Territory’s chief police officer said the move would attract interstate substance enthusiasts into the city on weekends, turning it into a “drug fantasy land”. Pretty amazing, if you ask me, although he somehow made it sound like a bad thing. Easy with the buzzkill, dude.

Sadly, even the wisest and most enlightened of reforms can produce minor collateral damage. Some citizens will be turned into the opioid-ravaged “zombies” that infest Philadelphia, America’s ironically named “City of Brotherly Love”; but with a bit of effort the police will eventually be able to distinguish them from low-grade public servants, probably because they’re swaying on the banks of Lake Burley Griffin, and not “working” from home.

This reform is not before time. Ever since an unfortunate misunderstanding in the back alleys of Tangiers sometime in the 1980s (if I knew the exact year, I wasn’t there, man) my inner Canberran has often wondered whether there’s a case for taking a more liberal, quasi-Darwinian approach to recreational drugs.

Chief Minister of the Australian Capital Territory Andrew Barr. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Put the big pharmaceutical companies in charge and have their sociopathic executives deliver high-quality gear at modest prices, instead of psychopathic Colombian head-loppers and Comanchero chemists flooding our nightclubs and veins with poisonous, garage-floor blends of dirty chemicals and brick dust.

Redirect the money squandered on ineffectual policing towards a terrifying information campaign (the government’s honed its skills in that arena over the past three years); have a narcotics free-for-all until everyone’s thoroughly bored with them or completely hooked (hey, I didn’t say it was a low-risk strategy); then spend the balance on rehabilitation programs and funerals. Fun for all the family.

Why it might even spark an artistic renaissance: the tortured Romantic poets of the 19th century created some of their finest work on a diet of laudanum and sighs.

Not everyone has the sophisticated junkie’s discipline to enjoy hard drugs in moderation, however. Some lacking moral fibre will find the battle against a tempting cocktail of crystal meth, heroin, LSD and cocaine so overwhelming they will seek any way out, in utter desperation.

Luckily, the ACT government has got you covered. When it’s all too much, their assisted suicide facilities will encourage and accommodate your final wishes, as long as you’re mature enough to make the decision (by their reckoning that happens when you turn 14, barely four years before you can be trusted with a glass of beer).

It’s not yet clear what methods of ending your life will be made available to you, but one thing’s for sure. Staying with our disturbed poets theme, you can forget the Sylvia Plath option: there’s no way the ACT mandarins will permit you to use a gas oven. If you decide to do away with yourself, no problem; but don’t you dare try to take our precious planet with you.