The War on Drugs

Destroying communities in order to ‘save’ them

Now we’ve got Bush’s so-called “War on Terrorism” striking fear into everybody’s hearts. But meanwhile another US-led war continues unabated, with much the same effect.

On 14 May this year a team of about 35 police staged a commando-style raid on the Oasis and Rainbow Cafés in Nimbin. Three weeks later a NSW Legislative Council Standing Committee handed down the report from its inquiry into police resources in Cabramatta, after public controversy had raged for months about policing in the area.

What do these two things have in common? Just that they are both episodes in the sad long history of the War on Drugs, and both demonstrate that the war on drugs is a war on people.

For those interstate and international readers who maybe don’t know, Nimbin is a small rural community in northern New South Wales. Since the early 70s it has been home to a number of communes and other alternative lifestyle experiments which grew out of the sociopolitical movements of the time, including the anti-Vietnam and anti-conscription struggles. The Oasis and the Rainbow had been operating as cannabis cafés for some two years, providing a way for people to buy cannabis, the Nimbin culture’s main drug of choice, in a safe and regulated environment.

Those who set up the cafés saw their action as a way of minimising the harm brought about by the laws that criminalise cannabis and other drugs. Michael Balderstone, of the Nimbin HEMP Embassy, commented after the May 14 raid: “Prohibition sets up a marketing structure that makes cannabis accessible to children, whereas regulation through the cafes had already made major inroads into the street dealing with sales strictly only to over 18 year olds and only small amounts. No-one was ever offered cannabis.” He also points out that Nimbin youth have grown up in a criminalised alternative culture and “have no respect for injustice, understandably” and that the easy money to be had in street dealing is tempting for them in a big way.

As far as the community knew, the cafés were not a problem. The local Chamber of Commerce and other conservative members of the community had commented positively on their impact on what was perceived as a problem street scene. The police had been involved in the local Community Drug Action Team where the cafés had been discussed. Cannabis law reform activists had sat in those very cafés with politicians and police, talking to them about it.

Then came the dogs!

The May 14 raid was carried out by armed police who bailed up everyone in the cafés with commands like: “Stay where you are!” and “Put your hands on the table, and don’t move!” Sniffer dogs were put onto patrons and staff. One man who hadn’t used marijuana or any other illegal drugs in years was identified by a sniffer dog and searched down to his shoes and socks. Police searched his bag and found prescription medicines he takes for anxiety and depression. They asked him to produce his doctor’s script! When he was eventually allowed to leave, he was so distraught that he barely managed to keep his car on the road getting home before succumbing to a panic attack. He was afraid to come into the village – or even out of his house – for a week or so.

Only the weekend before, Nimbin had played host to the annual Mardi Grass festival/drug law reform protest, when some ten thousand people thronged to Nimbin to take part in street parades, the Hemp Olympics and Peace Park festivities.

Many people were traumatised by the raids and the community itself feels outraged and betrayed. Nimbin has been suffering police harassment and raids for 25 years. Now it must deal with the aftermath of the May 14 raid. About 200 demonstrators turned up to support those arrested when they appeared at Lismore court on 4th June. Smaller “criminals” pleaded guilty and received varying fines, but two people – the Oasis manager and a volunteer worker at the Rainbow – face serious charges, with no hearing date yet set as we go to press.

The day after the raid, local doctor Dr David Helliwell called for the adaptation of legislation emerging from the 1999 NSW Drug Summit to enable Nimbin to run an officially sanctioned Cannabis Café Trial. However he was despondent about the prospects for such an initiative, given the events which had just taken place. Police-community relations in Nimbin have hit an all-time low, and the cannabis trade is back on the streets, without the safeguards offered by the cafés.

In Cabramatta, too, police-community relations have been a major casualty in the War on Drugs. (Again for people who may not know, Cabramatta is an area in Sydney’s south-west with a large Indo-Chinese population, most of whom settled here after the Vietnam War. Currently it has Sydney’s main street-level heroin market.) Justice Action’s submission to the Legislative Council’s Standing Committee Inquiry tried to take the debate beyond the question of what level of police resources should be deployed in the area, into an examination of unmet community needs and the negative impact of current policing strategies.

One of the things JA drew attention to in our submission was an eight-month boycott on cooperation with police imposed by community, youth and welfare workers in the area in 1999/2000 as a result of police targeting of a needle exchange and drug information bus. The bus had been set up as an initiative of the NSW Health Department through a local Youth Health Team. It gave advice and information to local drug users on issues such as AIDS, exchanged used needles for clean ones and acted as a drop-in venue. Police had initially promised to keep away from the bus, but on 11 September 1999 police entered it and searched young people. The following Friday a large number of police hung around in the vicinity of the bus, watching who turned up and following clients as they left. Local youth workers believe this led to a number of arrests. Other incidents around the same time included police officers masquerading as youth workers in order to enter the homes of young people, as part of a police operation called “Operation Hammer”.

The Youth Health Team bus had been operating for seven weeks at the time it was raided and had seen 1400 clients. According to the Fairfield Youth Workers’ Network, it had been extremely effective in terms of harm minimisation and accessing young people to mainstream welfare services. Following the September incidents, however, the number of young people visiting the bus dropped from around 65 a night to less than 15. Operation Hammer, said the Network, had directly contributed to an increase in unsafe injecting behaviour, which may have devastating long term effects upon both clients and the general population. In the short term, of course, it has had devastating effects upon the credibility of the youth workers in the area, and of the police themselves.

Operation Hammer was supposed to be a covert operation, until it blew its cover. Another police operation, however, which has been ongoing since 1997, involves aggressive and highly visible street policing. This is Operation Puccini. In one component of its strategy, Puccini targets train passengers at Cabramatta railway station and other stations round about, in accordance with the NSW police “Corridors of Crime” theory of criminal mobility. Such an approach brings a disproportionate amount of law enforcement down upon low-income earners and young people, while being unlikely to touch those organising and profiting from illicit drug distribution - who presumably don’t travel by public transport. In practice, according to a NSW University study, Operation Puccini has seen police indulge in widespread racial vilification of locals, with “nip” and “gook” being common terms of address. Young women train passengers in the company of their fathers have been accused of prostitution and drug dealing. Humiliating public searches are routine. Bottlenecks of impatient and distressed commuters are created around railway stations. The bulk of arrests have been of young people for fare evasion.

Operations Puccini and Hammer have brought young people into contact with the police in a way not likely to enhance their respect for the law. Larry Sherman, Professor of Criminology at Maryland University, has noted in his report for the US Justice Department, “Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn’t, What’s Promising”, that drug raids have only a temporary impact on crime rates, reducing them for a couple of weeks. However what he dubs “procedural justice”, the perception by those stopped by the police that they have been dealt with politely and fairly, has a significant long-term effect in reducing crime and recidivism rates. It seems reasonable to assume that the “procedural injustice” of Operations Puccini and Hammer would have the opposite effect.

NSW police are in fact poorly placed to deliver effective and appropriate services to a community of Cabramatta’s ethnic makeup. Ethnic recruiting initiatives proposed by the National Police Ethnic Advisory Bureau since its inception in 1993 have failed to gain substance in NSW Police policies or budgets. Anti-Asian racism enjoys a degree of official sanction in the NSW Police Service, and if this is not addressed, any recruits of SE Asian descent will probably find themselves marginalised and ineffective, as has been the experience of Aboriginal police officers.

Neither Hammer nor Puccini seems to have measurably reduced the quantity of drugs bought and sold in the Cabramatta area. But if the market has been largely unaffected, the community has not. In addition to the damage done to harm minimisation programs and police-community relations, one major consequence is the eventual impact on the community of subjecting a sizeable proportion of its youth to the criminogenic effect of long prison sentences. The disadvantage and lack of opportunity which drives young people into the drug market in the first place is likely to be solidly entrenched by an extended stay in prison. These people will be released back into the Cabramatta community over coming years with a greater than ever propensity to offend. Current social and drug law enforcement policies are likely to lead to a permanent underculture of those with little stake in the legal economy or broader community values, a phenomenon already seen with the emergence of Tri Minh Tran, murdered leader of the gang 5T, as a local folk hero.

The War on Drugs has world-wide casualties, of course, with the Third World hardest hit, as peasant communities are deprived of their only cash crop, poisoned by aerial fumigation, and have substances whose use is an integral part of their traditional cultures criminalised and destroyed. However both Nimbin and Cabramatta are Australian battlefields in this war. As in all the other US battlefields, the occupiers are having a hard time distinguishing their enemy from ordinary civilians, and failed policies and practices result in calls for more men and resources to pour into the same failed policies and practices. In both Nimbin and Cabramatta, the War on Drugs has ruined community initiatives, shattered respect for the law and the police, and put youth at increased risk. As in Vietnam, as everywhere, civil society is being destroyed in order to “save” it.

Justice Action has been working for years to see drugs recognised as a personal and/or health issue, not a criminal issue. Even the National Crime Authority has now called on the Federal Government to consider options “previously deemed unpalatable”, such as treating the supply of addictive drugs as a medical and treatment matter. And the NSW Director of Public Prosecutions, Nicholas Cowdery, has said that the overwhelming legal view is that drug addiction is a health and social problem “which cannot be effectively dealt with by the criminal justice system”. In the Netherlands and other European countries, police ignore the drug laws in practice; Portugal (of all places!) has gone one step further and decriminalised the use of all previously banned narcotics, from cannabis to crack cocaine. So why are people and communities in Australia still being criminalised for drugs?

THE JAILS ARE THE CRIME!!