Junkie Depopulation Looms

Drug traffickers love war, and recession.

Local illegal drug production usually increases in countries where war and major conflicts close down peacetime economies, and new markets for those drugs open up in countries where recession has stripped away wealth and assets and dignity.

Just as Australia grinds into recession, Afghanistan heroin appears, cheap, potent and about to flood the streets of Sydney and Melbourne, for starters.

This is the end product of Afghanistan's record opium crops of 2007, Even in the midst of war, or because of it, Afghanistan produces more than 90% of the world's opium supply.

A Cause :

There are 157,000 hectares (100 metres squared) of opium fields in Afghanistan producing 7,700 tonnes...of opium and the export value of opium, morphine and heroin at border prices in neighbouring countries for Afghan traffickers was worth $3.4bn last year.

An Effect :

Heroin is back on the streets of Sydney, sparking fears society will soon have to brace itself for the return of daily overdoses.

The Daily Telegraph can reveal the deadly and highly addictive drug is re-emerging and its use increasing after almost a 10-year drought.

Paramedics and emergency department doctors are beginning to treat an increasing number of addicts who have overdosed on heroin.

Unfortunately, high potency Afghan heroin is already finding a fresh market amongst the newly jobless, and homeless. Drug use and abuse booms during hard times.

Apparently, some Sydney junkies are now taking to mixing ice with their smack, and hospital staff are finding overdose victims hard to deal with, some needing three times the normal dose of the anti-opioid Narcan to come down, or back.


.

Busted

A massive police operation swept through the grinning crowds at the Sydney ParkLife festival yesterday, and came up with a measly handful of drug-related arrests :

The operation included general duties officers, traffic units, drug detection dogs, plain clothes officers, mounted police, licensing supervisors and operational support group personnel.

It's not that people are doing less drugs at these gigs, they simply know to imbibe their gear before they reach the police checkpoints. Police mostly cautioned those busted with personal-use amounts of cannabis, instead of hauling them away.

Police are in an interesting quandary. They know the more people on cannabis or Es, at festivals like Parklife, the less likely it is they will have to deal with toxic, violent drunks. But police have to spend their 'Fighting Drugs' budgets at the same time.

Still, there are no cocaine dogs patrolling the financial district, or Macquarie Street, of course. And while you will find police leading drug dogs through Kings Cross and along the platforms of Blacktown and Penrith train stations, you still won't see them along New South Road, Double Bay, Military Road, Cremorne, or Queen Street, Paddington.

Cops have to bust people for carrying small amounts of illegal drugs, just not so much the ones that can afford a battery of expensive lawyers or who have hassling political connections.

Police Say "Thank God" Youth Are Throwing Down Illegal Drugs Instead Of Alcohol



The day after the world's biggest Ecstasy bust goes down in Australia, this story appears with some fascinating insights on how police in one alcohol-soaked trouble spot regard the drug and its use by youth :

If it was not for the prevalence of ecstasy in Brisbane's Fortitude Valley, understaffed police say they would struggle to cope with the drunken violence.

"We're at the point where we're saying thank God 80 per cent of them are using an illegal drug rather than alcohol, even though in 10 years they'll be suffering manic depressive disorders," the officer said.

"But we just couldn't deal with that many people affected by alcohol."

Drug Arm national communications manager Josie Loth said it was well known that illicit drugs such as ecstasy were much more prevalent in the Valley than other parts of Brisbane.

She said although ecstasy was a stimulant it tended to relax people but alcohol had the opposite effect. "When certain people drink . . . it brings out more of a violent tendency, often leading to problems," Ms Loth said.

Australian Medical Association Emergency Department spokeswoman Alex Markwell said alcohol definitely contributed to a lot more injuries than drugs.

"Young men especially can become aggressive on alcohol and get involved in fights and assaults," she said.

"If people didn't drink we wouldn't see anywhere near as many patients as we do."

It's not all good news on the E, however. As police and health officials point out, the long-term effects of Ecstasy are as damaging as binge-drinking :

"The big thing a lot of us feel is that one of the most dangerous and insidious things about 'e' (ecstasy) is that most young people think it's not hurting them but every time they use it, it's hurting them a little," the officer said.

"We deal with them all the time; these kids who are now 30 or 40 who are suffering serious mental health problems as a result of their drug use in their 20s. Often it ends in suicide."

It's so very, very rare that we hear police talking honestly about drug use in society. We need more of it.



Darryl Mason is the author of the free, online novel ED Day : Dead Sydney. You can read it here

Doctor Says Stop Terrorism And Criminal Networks By Legalising All Drug Use

In a summit full of ideas...well, 100 or so, including a few new ones, this idea was too shocking, too unimaginable for most to even blink at :

The use of dangerous, addictive drugs should be decriminalised, a medical expert says.

Prison doctor Wendell Rosevear wants Australian-made heroin to be given to addicts in government-sanctioned doses by 2020.

In an idea slammed by family groups, he used Kevin Rudd's 2020 Summit to call for all drugs to be legalised.

The Queensland GP said keeping drugs illegal simply handed money to terrorists and criminals.

"I think it would be better to actually sell the opium that we grow in Tasmania and undercut the profits (of illegal drugs)," he said.

"Now, the profit margin is about 3000 per cent, from the farms to the street."

Dr Rosevear, who has 30 years' experience working in the jail system, wants safe and precise doses of drugs made available to users.

"People are taking unknown doses of unknown drugs from unknown sources, and they overdose and they die," he said.

Dr Rosevear said the change should apply to all drugs, including ecstasy, ice and marijuana.

Legalising all drugs is clearly insane.

The fallout from such a move would be catastrophic, and wide reaching.

Thousands of gangsters, distributors, street dealers and backyard chemists would be out of work, as the price of drugs plummet. Break and enters and car theft would decrease so dramatically that insurance companies would have trouble convincing people that they really need to insure everything in their homes, particularly their wall TVs.

And what about the alcohol industry? Most bartenders will tell you that stoned people drink less booze than the punters who walk in straight, and laser-eyed 20 years old on ecstasy don't drink any booze at all.

The alcohol industry would find its monopoly as legal non-pharmaceutical drug supplier to the nation being stripped away by real competition.

In a free market where most of the drugs now illegal were available to purchase, or consume in a legal venue, alcohol would have a hard time competing. Sales would plummet.

Imagine if one violent boozer, who medicated himself with alcohol, instead became a casual pot smoker? Imagine if 50,00 violent boozers ate so many hash-soaked cookies, instead of 20 schooners, every Friday and Saturday night that the only physical abuse they unleashed was on the XBox?

Ice is clearly nasty crap, illegal or legal. But a few thousand doctors, accountants and lawyers would sleep easier if they knew they could get a monthly prescription for morphine every month from their doctor.

It won't happen. Australians will instead have to make do with brain and society decaying levels of alcoholism, legal speed for attention problems and cheap, day melting doses of over the counter codeine from the local pharmacy.

The majority of Australians will continue to dose themselves almost every day with drugs, soft and hard drugs, because they want to alter their reality, or alter the way they feel, or the way they feel about themselves.

Australians enjoy getting high, and low, via plants, fermentation and chemicals, but the most important question remains how best to limit the addictions and the damage.

Australia's Massive 'Legal' Junkie Problem

For a couple of years in the early 1990s, I lived in and around Kings Cross. I met plenty of junkies.

Junkies, being drug addicts, know a lot about drugs. Some could rhapsodize about the comparative highs from legal and illegal drugs like wine connoisseurs. As the Cross junkies used to tell me, the best drugs of all are not the stuff you score on the street, it's the gear locked away in pharmacy safes, or in "the special drawers" behind the counter.

Heroin addicts don't shoot smack cut with shit because they like getting abscesses. They buy street smack because they can't get their hands on the legal stuff, unlike many doctors, lawyers and the occasional politician. Morphine. Pharmaceutical morphine is, or was, the prize beyond all prizes for the long-term junkheads of Kings Cross. At least four or five junkies I had taken the time to question told me their first opiate high came from a doctor. From a legal prescription.

The trick for those junkies was getting a doctor to prescribe "the diamond gear" for them. That is, pharmacuetical grade opiates. Self-mutilation in the pursuit of a doctor-delivered shot of morphine was not uncommon. A smashed tooth (from a screwdriver) could deliver a few days, or a few weeks (if the shattered gum was doctor-shopped) worth of prescription-only pills chock full of codeine, the little sister of morphine.

One old junkie, let's call him Dave, intervened to stop me getting mugged by three gutless fucks from the Northern Beaches in an alley next to the building where I lived back then. He filled a hypodermic with water from a puddle and then shouted "Oi! C.nts!" When one turned around, Dave squirted him with the brown water from the puddle. At 2am, in an alley sandwiched between tall buildings, it was dark enough for that water to look like blood, which is what Dave told them it was. "AIDS blood c.nts. Want a shot in a vein?"

After that, I always stopped to talk to Dave when I saw him stumbling along Darlinghurst Road. He never hit me up for money, but I probably gave him a few hundred dollars worth of cigarettes in the time I knew him. He gave me in return the wisdom of his years living rough and working harder in his low-income scams than most nine-to-fivers do in their offices.

It was Dave who gave me an education in street junkies versus pharmacy junkies. There might be thousands of smackies, he used to say, but there are hundreds of thousands of legal pill addicts. I found that hard to believe. Impossible, really.

But Dave was right of course. Australians throw down more prescription drugs than just about anyone else in the world, and the numbers of legal pill-popping junkies vastly outweigh those illegal drug-taking junkies your local tabloid columnist so often rants about.

Eight Nurofen-Plus washed down with a few glasses of red wine in half an hour is still drug abuse, even if you bought both drugs legally.

While the media and politicians roar and wail about the hundreds of thousands of Australians who smoke pot or neck an E or two most weekends, without dying, or overdosing, they remain, mostly, remarkably, quiet about the millions of Australians who abuse pharmacy-only and prescription pills on a regular basis and fill casualty wards and emergency rooms.

That's not even getting into the tens of thousands of elderly Australians who haul their old bodies from one doctor to another trading a few minutes of questions for a prescription for painkillers or sleeping tablets.

When the media does report on legal pill popping, the statistics, the levels of human wreckage, are absolutely staggering, and illegal drug abuse stats pales in comparison. Obviously, neither kinds of drug abuse are good, but that's not the point :

Paramedics are treating almost 8000 Melburnians a year for overdoses of prescription and over-the-counter drugs - 11 times the figure for heroin.

In the same period, almost 5100 Melburnians were treated for alcohol-related injuries and poisoning.

Medications are so addictive that 4400 Victorians sought treatment for addiction last year, Department of Human Services figures show.

Medicare's Prescription Shopping Program last year identified 52,925 Australians suspected of "doctor shopping" for more scripts than they needed.

Such medications kill up to three Australians a day - almost as many as die on roads.

Prescription medication is involved in up to 90 per cent of all drug deaths, says the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine's Prof Olaf Drummer.

Australian Medical Association state vice-president Dr Harry Hemley said dealing with prescription-drug addicts was the most serious problem facing doctors.

In the 12 months to last March -- the latest figures available -- paramedics treated almost 8000 people in Melbourne alone for overdoses of prescription and over-the-counter medications. Most victims were aged in their 30s -- and most were women.

Why is it that so many Australians want to get fucked up on pills and booze?

Is reality really that bad, or boring? Or do we simply love getting high?

They're Coming For The Children

Children of drug-and-alcohol addicted parents would be adopted out, and addicted children under 18 forced into rehab, if extremist conservatives like Liberal MP Bronwyn Bishop had their way.

Wait, my mistake. Did I write alcohol addicted parents? Okay, that was wrong. Bishop only wants drug-addicted parents to have their children taken away from them.

From news.com.au :

Liberal MPs on a House of Representatives committee inquiry into illicit drug use have called for a hardline approach to drug policy, including dumping the Government's "harm minimisation policy".

Naturally. Everybody knows that the hardline approach to drug policies always work a charm. Look at how few drug addicts there are in the US, for example, where only tens of millions of people are hooked on pills, cocaine, heroin and ice.

The committee recommends adoption be established as the "default" care option for children aged five and under, where child protection authorities had identified illicit drug use by the parents.

It also recommends amending legislation to allow for children up to 18 years to be placed in mandatory treatment if they are addicted to illicit drugs.

Labor MPs on the committee, in a dissenting report, raised concerns about how the inquiry had been conducted.

Some witnesses had experienced "outright hostility because their expert views did not accord with the personal beliefs or political aims of those questioning them", they said.

Outright hostility from extremists like Bishop? Accused of letting her "personal beliefs or political aims" get in the way of accurately assessing expert opinion? Tell me it's not true. I refuse to believe that.

It should come as no surprise that alcohol abuse wasn't considered anywhere near as dangerous, by conservatives in this parliamentary committee, as all those evil illegal drugs.

So why the focus on only seizing the abused or neglected children of smack junkies or ice freaks? Because most of them are poor and can't afford lawyers to fight back. Rich junkies can afford nannies to make sure their babies' nappies aren't crawling with cockroaches, or that 3 year old Tanya isn't undernourished.

And also because there's only a few thousand families where children are placed directly in harm's way by the use of those drugs by their parents.

If you start talking about alcohol, then the abuse and neglect figures rocket up to hundreds of thousands of families. Tearing apart the culture of abuse spawned by alcohol would mean deconstructing and rewriting the entire fabric of Australian society, where white middle class families, per capita, utterly outrank those of poor Aboriginal families for loading up on booze and beating ten kinds of hell out of their kids.

There's a problem with drug-addicted parents mistreating their children, of course there is, but it's typical of conservatives like Bishop to only focus on the smallest sliver of a far bigger problem. Naturally, the conservative tabloid media and talk back radio will praise politicians like Bishop for taking a "tough stance" and a "zero tolerance" approach to illegal drugs, while filling advertising space flogging the drug of choice for child-beating, kid-abusing mums and dads - alcohol.

Hell, drinking half a case of beer and punching your eight year old son the entire length of the hallway is an Australian tradition. It's how you turn wimpy little boys into real men, apparently.

'Right To Die' Movement Grows, As 'Pro-Death Choice' Seniors Smuggle Illegal Drugs And Establish Backyard Laboratories

Justice Minister Promise To Hunt Down And Prosecute More Than 800 Elderly Drug Makers

They are planning to get together in groups of eight or ten in secret locations in at least four Australian states. They are all over 60, and some are as old as 90. They're setting up backyard laboratories and these elderly Australians are planning to cook up illegal drugs, barbiturates in fact, strong enough to kill.

But these old folks want the drugs to kill them. That's why they are ready to defy the law and make the drugs. So when they decide it's time to die, then they take drink down a mouthful of the drug and expire, within minutes, if not seconds.

The drug is called Nembutal, and it's the drug of choice for those who want to practice "self-deliverance" or auto-euthanasia.

More than 100 elderly people are alleged to have illegally smuggled the drug into Australia from Mexico, where it is legally available in veterinarian supplies stores.

In an extraordinary documentary aired on ABC TV last night, a new hidden world of Australia's elderly was revealed - a 'Right To Die' movement that may number in the tens of thousands.

They don't want to go to nursing homes. They don't want to suffer in pain, or humiliation, as their minds and bodies fade and malfunction. They want to have the choice to die at a time of their own making.

There's little doubt that the drug of choice for these elderly people is effective. That's why it's so illegal in Australia, for human consumption anyway. Veterinarians use the drug, or a very similar kind of drug, to euthanize dogs. If it's acceptable to give respectful, quick deaths to dogs, their argument goes, why aren't they worthy of the same?

The documentary carried some terrible stats : More than 1100 elderly people have hung or shot themselves in Australia between 2000 and 2005. Hanging was not an option ruled out by some of those interviewed, but they dreaded what they would leave their children or neighbours to confront when their bodies were found.

The Australian government, backed by powerful Christian-aligned, "Right To Life" lobbyists, have been fighting a running battle against euthanasia in recent years.

The documentary, and an enormous talk back radio and online comment reaction this morning, revealed the extremely controversial subject of helping the terminally ill and elderly to end their lives may become a powerful issue in the upcoming federal election.

We have the right to vote, the right to drink, the right to exercise free will, but we do not have the right to die. Why? It's a question that has sparked flurries of controversy in Australia in recent years, but the issue looks set to become a national debate, with a promise by the federal justice minister that police will investigate and arrest any and all people, including the terminally ill, who attempt to smuggle the drug into Australia, or cook it up in backyard laboratories.

But many of the people interviewed in the documentary, 'Final Call', said they were prepared to go to jail to stand up for their right to die a quick and dignified death.

Once police start arresting 92 year old World War 2 veterans for making their own euthanasia drugs, it will become a story too big to ignore.

From ABC News :

An investigation by ABC TV's Four Corners program suggests there is a growing number of elderly Australians prepared to flout the law to commit suicide.

The euthanasia group Exit Australia has told the program more than 100 people have imported the prohibited sedative nembutal to Australia from Mexico while 100 more are preparing to do the same.

Exit Australia says 800 are interested in making the powerful sedative themselves.

Ninety-six-year-old Fred Short has told Four Corners he was part of a group that set up a backyard laboratory in the New South Wales Southern Highlands.

"I think there should be a legal means for people to choose their own time and place of death and to die with dignity," he said.

He says he is not worried about going to jail.

"It never has worried me - mind you at my time of life I probably wouldn't be there very long," he said.

It is alleged the backyard laboratory has successfully manufactured the drug.

John Edge has told Four Corners he took part in the exercise.

"It was really the blind leading the blind because what chemistry we learned at school has long been forgotten," he said.

How can a documentary about old people wanting to kill themselves be so inspiring?

Simple. It showed that if you have a bottle of the drug tucked away at home, you never need worry about getting so old and frail that you can't look after yourself anymore. The dread of being locked up in a nursing home disappears. The terror of having to undergo 'life-saving' operations only to face months of gruelling recovery evaporates.

You can beat nature, and God, with a simple twist of a bottlecap, one big swig and then lay down to (presumably) quietly accept your fate. Hopefully, with your family members, or close friends, by your side, or as recent visitors.

One of the most incredible scenes I've watched in either documentaries or fictional films in recent years unfolded the Four Corners report last night : a near-frail old man sits at his dining room table and unpacks a kit he has put together that will, with a flick of a switch, suffocate him.

It appears the man has designed and built the basic machine himself, because there is no legal version of it on the market. He talks about how he has to "test" the machine to make sure it will do what he built it to do. He doesn't want the machine to fail when he decides it's time to go.

Give me a choice, the man said, and I won't have to use the self-suffocation machine. Like every other old, and clearly sane and mentally alert, person in the documentary, this man wanted to get his hands on the drug that would guarantee a far less painful and horrible final exit.


From news.com.au :

Hundreds of elderly Australians planning to end their lives when they can no longer care for themselves, are conspiring to manufacture an illegal euthanasia drug.

The ABC's Four Corners program tonight said about 800 elderly people across Australia are waiting to get involved in making the drug nembutal in backyard laboratories, with at least four to be established soon in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Wollongong.

About 100 other older Australians were engaged in illegally importing the drug to Australia from the Mexican border town of Tijuana, close to the US city of San Diego.

Illegal possession of the prohibited drug carries a maximum penalty of two years' jail.

One of the illegal manufacturers, Bron Norman, said the drug should be available for those who wish to commit suicide when they have outlived their useful life.

"It's outrageous that we've been forced into this position because we can't legally obtain a drug that will give us a peaceful death when we want one," she told the ABC.

"It's not illegal to end your life. Why is it illegal to have the drug that will do it?"

The ABC TV message board discussing the documentary contains hundreds of comments from health professionals and elderly people demanding the laws be changed so those who decide it's time to go can do so, painlessly and effectively.

Some of the stories about the suffering experienced by sick, elderly people in Australian nursing homes are heartbreaking, as are the tales told by hospital staff, who are forced, by law, to subject some terminally ill people to "life-saving" operations they neither want to give, and that their patients do not want to endure.

In the face of hearing directly from those nearing the end of their lives calmly, sanely discussing why they want to die by their own hand, the pro-life lobbyists and activists' arguments of morality sound weak and pointless.

Why should an elderly person who is ready to go, and has no thirst for further life, be forced by lack of an alternative to shoot or hang themselves?

The only reality-based answer is : they shouldn't.

Pathetic arguments about how "Jesus suffered on the Cross" so therefore we must suffer as well, in order to be worthy of eternal life, are an insult to the elderly people of our society, and a fevered distortion of any teachings attributed to Jesus Christ.

As one elderly man in the documentary pointed out, why did his generation fight in World War 2 for the freedoms now enjoyed by all Australians, when he is denied the most important freedom of all : when to decide it's time to live, and when to decide it's time to die?

It's a powerful question, and one that both the Howard federal government, and the Rudd opposition government, are terrified of being forced to answer.

As millions of Baby Boomers move into their senior years, and become one of the most powerful voting blocks, it is a question any future government will no longer be able to avoid answering.


Justice Minister Says Elderly People Who Smuggle Or Make Illegal Death Drug Will Be "Brought Before The Courts"

Full Transcript Of The 'Right To Die A Dignified Death' Documentary "Final Call"