HaCKeRz KrOnIcKLeZ 3/HaCKeRz_KrOnIcKLeZ.iso/drugs/review.mr.sin.to.mr.big

Internet Message Format | 1996-05-06 | 10KB

From: [e-mail] (Paul Hermsen)
Newsgroups: alt.drugs,aus.politics,talk.politics.drugs,soc.culture.australian
Subject: Book Details:  From Mr Sin to Mr Big (Desmond Manderson)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 1995 02:52:20 GMT
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>

I posted details on the book "From Mr Sin to Mr Big" by Desmond Manderson from
memory, and stuffed up the publisher.
Here are the corrected details:

Title: From Mr Sin to Mr Big
Auth:  Desmond Manderson
Published: 1993
Publisher: Oxford University Press Australia
ISBN: 0 19 553531 6

Background to the Book.
(From back cover)

From Mr Sin to Mr Big is a compelling legal and social history of the origins
and development of drug laws in Australia.  It argues that the selective
enactment of 'drug' laws has been driven by fear, racism, powerful
international pressures, and the vested interests of the medical profession,
bureaucrats and politicians, rather than by genuine concerns about the welfare
of users.
Behind the emotion and contoversy that surround the use of illegal drugs lie
previously unexamined assumptions about how and why certain substances - such
as opium, herion and cannabis - have been prohibited, while others - such as
alcolhol and tobacco - have not.  This book challenges these assumptions,
while also examining the power and efficacy of law as a means of achieving
social change.
Desmond Manderson traces the legislative developments, from the anti-opium
laws directed against the Chinese in the nineteenth century, to the complex
web of our present drug laws, and illustrates the gradual politicisation of
the drugs debate.  From Mr Sin to Mr Big argues that Australia's current drug
laws are a product of the past, and it is only by understanding this past that
we can begin a rational debate about reform in the future.

[note]
Desmond Manderson is a lawyer and historian who has written extensively on
drug histroy and policy.  After studying and teaching at the Australian
Nuational University in Canberra for several years, he is currently engaged in
research at the Centre for Medicine, Ethics, and Law at McGill University in
Montreal, Canada.  [accurate at 1993 : PH]

[summary of the research programs]
As part of his Honours thesis in History, Manderson researched for a small
publication funded by the Research into Drug Abuse Program (RIDAP) of the
National Campaign Against Drug Abuse (NCADA).
Following his Honours thesis, it was suggested that he work on a larger
project into the history of drug laws in Australia, again supported by RIDAP,
under the Commonwealth (Federal, for our world audience) Department of
Community Services and Health.
(PH: Its good to see that the Commonwealth Government has the courage to
sponsor research which highlights the errors in its own position and policy)

Interesting quotes from the book.
(page 7)
In nineteenth-century Australia, opium was the preserve of neither the
creative few nor the urban poor.  It was freely available and freely used.
Futhermore, perhaps partly as a consequence of the weakness of the medical
profession, the line which is now seen to divide medical 'use' form
non-medical 'abuse' was not yet apparent.  Many people who consumed opium
undoubtedly did so out of habit.  Indeed, temperance activists who would
rather forfiet their lives than drink a nip of whiskey, but who were addcited
to opium, were the butt of many jokes. 'I believe the teetotallers have too
little pleasure in this world, whatever they may hope for in the next,' said
Godfrey Carter, a member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly well known for
his opposition to the temperance movemnet, in 1898,
   "and when I think what little joy they have here at present is derived, to
    a great extent, from the use of morphia, chlorodyne, painkiller, and a
    variety of other preparations of opium, why should we prevent them from
    goin to their chemists and getting these things?"

(page 19)
As the "Bulletin", whose masthead proudly proclaimed 'Australia for the White
Man', stated in 1889:
   "The badness of the Chinaman, socially and morally, is the outcome of his
   low wages ... If Chinamen will tomorrow refuse to work for less wages, man
   for man, than Britons, and will refuse to work longer hours, the head and
   front of the objections to their presence will disappear."
For the "Bulletin", the Chinese were 'jaundice-coloured apostles of unlimited
competition'.
The propents of a 'White Australia', however, slid with ease from arguments of
economic protectionism to visceral racism.  The Chinese were painted as living
squalidly and in filth, their habits depraved and thier lives degraded.  The
absence of Chinese women was seen as a threat to the honour and chastity of
innocent European women and girls (and prostitution certainly flourished in
the Chinatowns of large communities).  That the Chinese men worked on Sundays
was portrayed as an indication of the infiltration of paganism and
devil-worshiping into god-fearing Australian society.  In the slandering of
the Chinese, almost anything went, as this extract from a tract written by
someone who went by the ironic pseudonum 'Humanity' shows:
   "The Chinese amidst their evil surroundings, and their filthy and sinful
   abodes of sin and swinish devilry [will be] entered into by the servants of
   the Most High God!  May the wayside scattering of the seed of holiness and
   truth take root in the hotbed of all unholy and unclean vices! ... It would
   never be believed that our Saxon and Norman girls could have sunk so low in
   crime as to consort with such a herd of Gorilla Devils..."

(page 23-24)
Opium was seen as a pollutant, moral as well as physical; it was tainted by
the environment of its consumption and by its connections with the Chinese
themselves.  The potency of these separate aesthetic revulsions-against
dirtiness, the Chinese, and the smell of opium-was compounded by their mutual
association, as can be seen from the description of an opium den contained in
the 'Bulletin's" 1886 feature on 'The Chinese in Australia':
   "Down from the fan-tan den are stairs leading to lower and dirtier abodes:
   rooms darker than and more greasy than anything on the ground floor: rooms
   where the legions of aggressive stinks peculiar to Chinamen seems to linger
   ... Yet the rooms are not naturally repulsive, nor would they be so when
   occupied by other tenants; but the Chinaman has defiled their walls with
   his filthy touch; he has vitiated what was once a reasonably pure
   atmosphere with his presence, and he has polluted the premises with his
   disgusting habits; and so it is that nought save suggestions of evil,
   incentives of disgust and associations of vice, now seems to move in the
   fetid atmosphere ... The very air of the alley is impregnated with the
   heavy odour of the drug."
From being seen as a dirty habit in dirty people, opium smoking came to be
seen as an immoral habit in hated people.  It was a small step readily taken:
froma symbol of depravity, opium became a cause of it; from a sign of evil, it
became an active agent of it.

(page 32)
Sub-title: 'They all go to the Chinaman': Aboriginal Opium Laws and the Chinese

In fact, the first laws specifically to prohibit opium did not seem to deal
with the Chinese use of it at all.  The Queensland "Sale and Use of Poison Act
1891" penalised
  "any person who supplies, or permits to be supplied, any opium to any
   aboriginal native of Australia or half-caste of that race ... except for
   medicinal purposes ..."

(page 36)
A man named Corbett, 'speaking for all other farmers', complained that 'they
could not get the blacks to work when when they wanted them, while the
Chinese', who farmed half of the surrounding land, could always get them, a
fact which he accounted for by saying that the Celestial paid their Aboriginal
employees in opium'.  The solution seemed simple.  As the local carpenter
argued, 'the blacks should be taken from the Chinese and compelled to work for
any European who might require their services'.  Opium was, as ever, a
scapegoat.  The local White farmers, wanting cheap Black labour, could not
understand why they would rather work for the Chinese.  The use of opium was
fastened upon as the only possible explanation for such a perverse choice.

The more likely truth was that the Chinese treated the Aboriginal with a
modicum of respect.  Roth reported the local police as saying that is the
White population ceased starving and mistreating its Black employees, it could
get as many workiers as it wanted.  But even the crudest kind of decency
appears to have been beyond some of the locals.  A man named Putt expressed
his grievance with incredulity:
   "I have shot thirteen or forteen niggers in this District and this is all
   the Government has done for me:-I can't get a _____ nigger when I want one.
   They all go to the Chinaman."

[I'm short on time so I'll skip to modern times : PH]

(page 204-205)
Senator Peter Baume, amongst others, has spoken with more and more conviction
as the years have passed.  In one of his last parliamentary speeches on the
subject, before retiring to take up an appointment as Professor of Community
Medicine at the University of New South Wales, he said:
   "Our strategies seek to prevent the production of certain designated
   illegal substances, and fail to do so; they seek to prevent the importation
   of substances, and fail to do so; they seek to prevent the distribution of
   substances, and fail to do so; they seek to prevent the sale and use of
   substances, and fail to do so."

(page 207)
One thing is apparent. 'Drugs' is a subject which people approach with many
erroneous preconceptions, and a little knowledge can change people's opinions
profoundly.  Both Peter Baume and Peter Cleeland, chairmen of influential
parliamentary committees on the subject, have stressed to me how much their
thinking began to change when they first started to read and to listen.

[PH : I think this last quote says it all]

Paul Hermsen.