If Australian cities could be defined by an aroma, you might pick jasmine for Sydney, tropical rain for Brisbane, coffee for Melbourne. While Adelaide would probably stump for an earthy shiraz or a fragrant bunch of Ross roses, the sad reality is that for many Adelaide households the defining aroma is the sickly stench of bong water.
The do-nothing culture of Adelaide’s sizeable unemployed underclass has been defined in large part by one of Australia’s greatest public policy failures – the liberalised cannabis laws which normalised the daily use of marijuana. Equally, the explosion in the size and reach of biker gangs in the City of Churches was fuelled by those laws, which for a long time enabled a virtual franchising of backyard dope production through hydroponics.
Even today, now that the laws have been tightened, there are more hydroponic shops in Adelaide per capita than any other city in the land. One website says there are more shops here per capita than any other city in the world, including Vancouver, where cannabis is decriminalised. According to one pro-cannabis website I read this week, there’s about 40 of these stores in the metropolitan area alone.
This means one of two things – that South Australians love nothing more than a home-grown tomato, or there’s still a hell of lot of people growing dope.
On the very rare occasions that I smell dope, such as at an outdoor concert the other night when a nearby stranger lit up a joint, I am immediately transported back to Adelaide in the late 1980s when cannabis was everywhere. The 10 plant rule was still in place then, a ludicrously liberal regime whereby anyone caught growing 10 plants or less, provided they weren’t also caught with drug-dealing equipment such as scales and money bags, could argue that the dope was for their personal use, and only receive an on-the-spot $55 fine.
It was ubiquitous throughout university, and when I started my career at The Advertiser, the six months I spent on police rounds provided a scenic tour of crime scenes at the many bongwater-scented households of our more depressed suburbs.
The landscape has changed in the past two decades – at least in terms of the law. Since then successive governments have wound back the laws, first from 10 plants to three, most recently from three plants to one. Under the current laws, that one plant may only be grown conventionally, in the garden or a shade-house, not indoors hydroponically and under lights.
The shift in the legislation reflected the growing use of hydroponics to maximise both the size and strength of cannabis plants.
The long-serving Labor MP and former Attorney-General Mick Atkinson told me that the liberalised cannabis laws might have seemed like a good idea at the time, but became a good example of legislation failing to keep pace with society change.
“My generation enjoyed their giggle grass at uni that they grew in their backyards or bought at the uni bar,” Atkinson says. “They never really came to grips with the high concentration of THC of modern dope because it had been bred to perfection with about eight times the THC in it. It had a far greater effect than was foreseen by the legislators of my generation.”
The result of leaving the 10 plant rule in place – and even initially stumping for the seemingly tougher three-plant rule – was that Adelaide could become the focus for the growth and distribution of the drug.
“In the words of some of the pro-cannabis websites, it made us the cannabis capital,” Atkinson says. “It was being farmed out by outlaw motorcycle gangs, turned into a cottage industry where people grew it and reported to their local leader who looked after distribution.”
Atkinson says that he does not believe SA should go further still and get rid of the cannabis expiation system, fearing it would mean that instead of issuing minor offenders with a fine for possessing a small amount of cannabis, police would probably let them off with a caution.
But he believes the problem lies with the sentencing patterns of the courts against offenders caught with moderate amounts of the drug.
“The actual penalties imposed by the courts are so low as to be an inducement,” he says. “The maximum penalties are huge but the courts regards cannabis as a second or third-order issue and sentence accordingly. This is where the change needs to come.”
It’s hard to bag the judiciary too much for taking this view, as it probably reflects a laissez-faire attitude which is held more broadly in the community.
The question is whether we are all too laissez-faire, particularly in SA. Dope has loomed larger in SA than anywhere else in Australia because it was so permissible for so long. Everyone I know smoked the stuff to varying degrees during their adolescence and emerged relatively sane on the other side. But there is now so much evidence of the links between dope smoking and mental illness that this laidback approach should really be questioned. Equally, the role of dope as the perfect accompaniment to a lifetime of couch-bound indolence means we’re effectively writing off its most enthusiastic users as potential contributors to society.
Atkinson again: “I see some households where usually a son has got right into dope and is now unemployable and also has a mental illness, living with his parents until they die, incapable of working.”
My guess is you’d see more of those families in Adelaide than in the rest of the country because of our weird, failed experiment.
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