Desmond Manderson’s High Time – How Australia changed its mind about illegal drugs, is a social history of Australia’s drug policy and a must-read for policymakers.
The great Canberra Times cartoonist Geoff Pryor depicted Prime Minister John Howard during his “Tough on Drugs” zero-tolerance crusade as Howard might have been at university. Other students are lazing around the dorm, long hair in bandanas, tie-dye clothes everywhere and an obvious purple haze hovering, as Howard, in school uniform, enters, all round eyes and awkwardness.
“Hey John, wanna joint?” offers one of the friendly long-hairs. “Oh, yes please,” replies the preppy Howard. “Lamb’s my favourite!”
Pryor was too kind. When it came to drugs, Howard wasn’t merely gormless: he was gutless, a roadblock on Australia’s gradual awakening from a blinkered law-enforcement-only regime to an acceptance of harm minimisation as the better approach to drug misuse.
There was no lack of science before Howard, as noted in Desmond Manderson’s new book, High Time – How Australia changed its mind about illegal drugs, a compendium of inarguable evidence, brightly presented.
The historical sweep of this book is impressive: from 19th-century Aboriginal girls being the victims of Chinese opium-pushing men to federal Labor’s lifesaving move in July 2022 (shortly after its election victory) to expand access to take-home naloxone (the overdose-reversing drug), without cost and without prescription.
High Time outlines the past 40 years of “dramatic” change in drug policy “as well as the efforts, halting and provisional to be sure, to undo some of the damage a century of drug prohibition has caused”.
Manderson does this with evidence. Page after page of detailed evidence – because this is an area of policy were preconceptions and prejudices are rife and where criticism comes quick and harsh. It is an understatement to say this is a controversial area, with Manderson contrasting the stances of various public figures.
The message of Howard’s 1998 Australian National Council on Drugs, headed by Brian Watters, was prohibition with zero tolerance. Watters came from the Salvation Army, as did, Manderson relates, Les Drew, who was an advocate, as is Manderson, for the harm-minimisation approach, treating drug use as a health problem rather than a law-and-order problem.
“Watters stood for a religion of rules; Drew for one of ethics;” Manderson writes. “Watters for a religion of absolutes; Drew for one of compassion.”
Another striking contrast was Howard himself with Labor’s Bob Hawke. When Howard set up the above-mentioned council, he spoke not of evidence but of being a father and of “moral leadership for our children’s sake”. Contrast that with Hawke’s identity as a father showing his “acute vulnerability” in 1984 over his daughter’s addiction in what Manderson sees as an early turning point toward harm minimisation as the preferred policy choice.
Another contrast – in the reaction to the deaths of two young people – is even more revealing about how hard it is to shift community attitudes.
The Victorian deputy coroner reported on six deaths (including of four people of Southeast Asian descent) at festivals from December 2017 to January 2019. Manderson notes that none of these deaths “achieved the kind of awful celebrity” that surrounded the death at a festival of Sydney girl Anna Wood, whose parents were very public advocates of prohibition.
“One reason for the Government’s dismissive response to the recommendations of the inquest may lie in the difference between how the media responds to the death of a young white woman and that of a young Asian man,” Manderson writes.
High Time reminds us of some of the heroes of the fight for harm minimisation. Liberal ACT Chief Minister Kate Carnell, a former pharmacist, pushed for a pilot trial of a safe heroin injecting room in the Territory. She won the backing of the Ministerial Council on Drug Strategy and had it signed off by federal Liberal Health Minister Michael Wooldridge. Carnell was reported as saying this was “the most dramatic breakthrough in drug treatment in 25 years”.
Enter John Laws, Alan Jones and The Daily Telegraph. Over three weeks, PM Howard went from “lofty silence” to become “profoundly sceptical”, which quickly morphed into the “hostility” that saw his Cabinet refuse to endorse the move.
Another hero, Liberal Peter Baume, a doctor, chaired the Senate Standing Committee on Social Welfare (1974–1977), which reported that, even then, Australia had a “drug-problem” problem. Baume’s committee presciently concluded that the problem was not drugs but how we talked about them and, remember, this is half a century ago (during Howard’s first two terms in Parliament).
Other heroes include the criminologist and judge, Professor Ron Sackville, whose ground-breaking Royal commission report was never taken up by the South Australian Parliament after ill-health forced Premier Don Dunstan out of office; and the indefatigable Dr David Caldicott, the champion of the first legal pill-testing trial in Australia.
Perhaps the greatest hero is Alex Wodak, the young physician who in 1982 became director of the Alcohol and Drug Service at Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital, in the middle of the largest concentration of Australians who used illicit drugs, of Australia’s largest drug market (King’s Cross) and the largest concentration of people dying from overdose.
Manderson recalls, “After 13 unsuccessful submissions to the NSW Department of Health and faced with the hostility, or at best suspicion, of the NSW Police, Wodak resorted to what he himself later described as ‘civil disobedience’”.
With colleagues, he put a hand-written sign out the front of his unit – “Free needles and syringes here”. They paid for 1,000 out of their own pockets.
Wodak recalled to a later inquiry, “I had four children, a wife, a new career. I happily put all that at risk in order to get needle syringe programs started.”
Many, many lives were saved, despite the fierce, and official, opposition. Wodak’s leadership is what Benjamin Franklin spoke of more than two centuries ago: “We must not in the course of public life expect immediate approbation and immediate grateful acknowledgment of our services. But let us persevere through abuse and even injury. The internal satisfaction of a good conscience is always present, and time will do us justice in the minds of the people, even those at present the most prejudiced against us.”
Don’t shy away from Manderson’s book, thinking it will be dry and academic, or that it will be wet and one-eyed. It is neither: it is social and political history in a literally vital area of policy. It should be on the desk of every member of every parliament in the nation.
Andrew Fraser began his journalistic career in 1979 and has been practising criminal law since 2008.