Drugs

Sunday mornings are usually a fairly quiet affair in my apartment until around 11am when my swollen bladder, thumping headache and noisy neighbours force me from the safety of my bed.

Last Sunday however was special as I managed the truly Olympic effort of making it downstairs to the couch by the crack of 10am. However seconds after collapsing victoriously onto the couch to enjoy this small victory I was assailed by suggestions for ‘fun things to do’ from my ever perky med-student ‘houseguest’.

Ms Gen Y was absolutely bursting with energy after her 3 hours of sleep, I on the other hand felt like Amy Winehouses’ liver, so I politely declined her invitation. She insisted. I more forcefully declined. She begged. I told her to leave me alone and flee the country - and that’s when she told me I had SCTD.

Continue reading "Why I don’t date doctors" »

The Daily Telegraph ran the story today as its Monday lead, “Drug lords hit town – cartels get rich on Aussie hunger for cocaine”.

A “generational shift” the paper explained, has pushed the demand for the drug making Australia the world’s most lucrative coke market. 

While this was surely a shock for the few Sydneysiders who haven’t stepped out to a bar, club, trendy restaurant or party in the past few years, for the rest of us, the story was more a case of no shit Sherlock than shock. Because, if you live in Sydney and are under the age of 55, chances are you will run into the drug every day if you knew what you were looking for.

Continue reading "Sydney awash with coke" »

You would think a drug that causes more than one in ten suicides, thousands of child abuse cases, and one in three road accidents would be outlawed.

Not chance, of course, because that’s alcohol. Cannabis, on the other hand, mostly causes feelings of wellbeing.

Debate over the relative harms of drugs has been raging this week. Most of the debate has been in the UK, where government drug advisor Professor David Nutt has been sacked for, in essence, arguing that drugs should be categorised according to the harm they cause. Crazy, huh?

Continue reading "Only a dope would say cannabis is worse than grog" »

Welcome to the weekend @ The Punch

Fact: on this day in 1988 sprinter Ben Johnson is stripped of his gold medal at the Seoul Olympics after failing a drug test. The video above is part one of a five part series that you can watch from here. Where do you stand on the issue of drugs and sport? Post your thoughts here.

Few things sting more than a betrayal but when you’re a teenager it’s brutal.

Having to decide who you are and who you want to be is a tough job and often your right to privacy becomes your most important weapon. Who doesn’t remember screaming matches with their parents about what they should be entitled to?

So 20 year old Jake Myerson’s reaction to his mother’s book “The Lost Child” a story of his teenage struggle with drugs - that ended with his parents kicking him out of the house - isn’t surprising:

Continue reading "Truth is the best story" »

She sits in a prison, thousands of kilometres away from her family and friends. She doesn’t speak the language and doesn’t think much of the food that’s served up to her.

Her only crime was to try and bring drugs into a foreign country to make a bit of money and now she is stuck in a foreign jail for what must seem like an eternity.

How could you not feel sympathy for her? Easy. Her name isn’t Schapelle Corby.

Continue reading "How many other Schapelle Corbys are there?" »

On the current, sickening trends, the number of Mexicans killed in the drug-related bloodshed which has paralysed the country since January 2007 will hit 10,000 within the next few weeks, or possibly even days.

To put that in perspective, an estimated 3500 people died in the 30-year period of The Troubles in Northern Ireland. It also eclipses the number of American troops killed in the War in Iraq, which at the latest count stands at 4333.

Australia’s sizeable cokehead community - even the casual users who had a discreet line in the loo last night at some groovy Sydney wine bar - should give themselves a quiet pat on the back for the role they’ve played in the deaths of these people.

Continue reading "How poseurs and clubbers helped kill 10,000 Mexicans" »

An American company has announced that it will now make available in Australia kits that will let parents test their children for drug use.

The drug testing kits use samples of hair to test what drugs and how often kids could be using them.

The company, Confirm Biosciences, has circulated a statement claiming that the new kits will put “control back in parents’’ hands

Continue reading "Should parents be testing kids for drugs in the home?" »

The sole remaining daily reminder in Australia of the existence of Schapelle Corby is the plastic luggage-wrapping service at our international airports.

More than four years after her conviction on drug smuggling charges - when Corby was the only story in Australia, the only topic of discussion at the pub, at barbecues, in the office tea room - the one thing that reminds us that she even exists is the roll of industrial cling-film in our departure lounges, so you can make sure your baggage leaves our shores and arrives overseas without 4.2kg of cannabis in it.

As she prepares to celebrate her 32nd birthday tomorrow - her fifth inside Bali’s Kerobokan jail - prison authorites let Schapelle have her hair cut and coloured by a professional hairdresser, saying they hoped it would cheer her up as she continues to fight with severe depression.

Her illness may be fuelled by the knowledge that almost all of her countrymen have pretty much forgotten about her - and that unlike in 2005, when most Australians disputed her guilt, public opinion appears to have swung the other way, not just against her but members of her family.

Continue reading "How Australia forgot about Schapelle Corby" »

My grandmother is 92 years old and lives in public housing in Adelaide’s southern suburbs. She is a custodian of wonderful old Australian expressions and a woman of firm and earthy convictions. One of her convictions is that Sydney is basically a dump, “a den of iniquity” as she puts it, its harbour wasted on spivs, tarts, crooks and hookers. A morally-bankrupt dive which has never really shaken off its uncouth convict past, and where no-one of sound mind would choose to live.

I’m starting to think she might be on to something.

This might sound odd given that it’s barely a month since I penned a sweetheart’s letter to my adoptive home of 10 years by listing the 40 things I love about Sydney.

This column is about the one thing I really hate, and am hating more with each passing day. It’s not the roads, it’s not the cost of living, heaven forbid it’s not even the State Government. It’s Sydney’s out-of-control gangster culture, which in the past few months has gone from a relatively controlled background phenomenon to a full-blown cult of violence and vanity, where the authorities have been made to look like fools as the lawless increasingly act as they wish, egged on - most alarmingly - by apparently sane people who come over all giggly and start twirling their hair in the presence of drug-dealers, bikie leaders and stand-over men.

Continue reading "Crims and their clique turn Sydney into an open sewer" »

1. Drug prohibition doesn’t work. During the last half century, almost every country in the world signed three United Nations drug treaties committing these countries to minimise the recreational use of specified drugs. Almost every country expanded their police drug squads, rained gold bars on drug law enforcement and kept on increasing the severity of penalties for drug offences. What was the result? Global heroin, cocaine and cannabis production and consumption continued to soar while world heroin production doubled in the last 10 years.

Continue reading "Ten things you should know about drug prohibition" »

Australians are the biggest per capita users of ecstasy in the world, a statistic no one in their right mind can believe is one to be proud of.

Politicians routinely hatch solutions to the growing degradation of our collective intellect caused by the misuse of amphetamines but they routinely ignore a simple solution to the problem.

That solution will again be put to the nation’s police ministers and the new Federal Home Affairs Minister Brendan O’Connor when they meet in Perth tomorrow. It involves the very simple step of regulating the import of presses used to make ecstasy tablets.

Continue reading "One simple way to take ecstasy pills off the street" »

Nothing illustrates the resilience and resourcefulness of organised crime than the story of a Sydney cocaine dealer known to police as ‘Aunty’. She is a Colombian woman in her fifties who came to Australia with her family in the 1970s. She is the face of a syndicate that has been operating for almost two decades.

Her husband stays in the background but has the necessary power and influence with Colombian cocaine barons. The syndicate imports around a tonne of cocaine every eighteen months. It is estimated to have carried out at least ten and possibly as many as fourteen importations (totalling between 10 and 14 tonnes of the drug). The cocaine is sold in bulk, primarily to networks in Sydney, but it also makes its way to other state capitals.

The retirement of some distributors and the arrest and jailing of others enabled an eastern suburbs professional surfer and dealer Shane Hatfield to progress up the drug chain. By the early 2000s he was dealing directly with Aunty. One of Hatfield’s distributors was a criminal in his mid twenties who has been given the pseudonym ‘Tom’ by law-enforcement authorities.

Continue reading "The Aussie mother behind a $30 million cocaine deal" »

Australia has the highest rate of ecstasy use in the world. Frightening isn’t it? So what’s being done about it? Like many other policy issues, the PM declared war on drugs but it is more a phoney war than a real one.

Since being elected the Government has failed to take any significant action on this major health and criminal problem. Instead General Rudd and his loyal lieutenants have sent the troops into the goldmine by introducing a new tax on pre-mixed lolly water rather than sending them to the front line and fighting the real war on illicit drugs.

Continue reading "Too giggly on alcopops to tackle hard drugs" »