SYDNEY TEEN'S SYNTHETIC-HALLUCINOGEN RELATED DEATH

 “The reality is you don’t know what you’re putting in your mouth”, says St Vincent’s Hospital’s celebrity Emergency Department Director, Prof Gordian Fulde. It makes as much sense as anything else that’s been said in the cacophonous blathering over a Sydney teen’s tragic, synthetic hallucinogen-related death.

            The inherent absurdity of the prohibitionist approach is encapsulated in today’s standard media line: “Calls to ban synthetic drugs as a teenager falls to his death after taking what he thought was LSD”. According to this logic, Henry Kwan would’ve been better off if only he’d gotten the real stuff.

            So, brothers and sisters, strap yourselves-in for another round of hysteria; of ill thought-out pronouncements and tabloid terror. Prepare to see the grief of another bereaved parent exploited to further a pointless, destructive moral crusade.

            Forgotten amid the breast-beating will be the fact that, if billions of dollars and thousands of lives hadn’t been wasted in a forty-year War on Drugs, these synthetic substitutes ­ – far from being enticing – wouldn’t even exist.

            One of the voices always heard when this discussion heats up is the father of Anna Wood. Twenty-odd years ago now, Anna’s death was the spark for an anti-ecstasy campaign that caused current-affairs viewers everywhere to wet themselves in well-meaning horror. I feel sorry for Mr Wood’s loss, but his contribution to public debate on drugs policy has been a fount of emotive misinformation; he has helped perpetuate the kind of suffering his own family endured.

            You see, Anna died after taking not ecstasy, but a horse tranquiliser she purchased thinking it was ecstasy. Sound familiar? Henry Kwan “believed he could fly” after taking something he wrongly believed was LSD. The point isn’t that drugs are good, but that drug-dealers are innovative mercenaries – and that prohibition only creates new markets and more suffering. If an unscrupulous factory-owner tried to profit by selling jars of shit labelled “Peanut-Butter”, there would be no call to ban peanut-butter. But hey, at least the public gets to feel morally superior about fighting the good fight.

            Meanwhile, a new study out of Canada shows that, not only do registered heroin trials save lives, but they also cost the public purse much less than the alternatives; and a higher proportion of participants take advantage of rehab services than those in methadone or twelve-step programs – more people get clean; fewer people die.

            That’s worth thinking about, surely? No, you’re right; probably not. Better to keep tilting at windmills ...