WARNING! - Drug Users Being Responsible ... Again!

What is it with the mention of drugs that send journalists into a frenzy of drug hysteria? Is it the journalist or is it the media organisation they are writing for that creates a maelstrom of exaggeration, panic and moral frenzy? The Australian Heroin Diaries has previously reported on some real cracker articles by Fiona Connelly, Sally Morrell, Piers Akerhead, Miranda Devine, Laurie Nowell etc. Except for the Devine Ms. Miranda, they all write for news.com.au. So what possessed Ben Harvy and Lauren Zwaans to write the article in the Adelaide Advertiser titled, Drug Dealers And Users Can Google Up A Few Hits?

Let’s see. It had nothing to do with drug dealers, nothing to do with “hits” and nothing to do with Google. That kind of spoils the clever headline pun. Maybe it’s part of the Adelaide Advertiser’s attempt to run it’s own special investigation like the CourierMail’s, The Drug Scourge from a few months back? Gawd, I hope not. Why then write about the website, Pillreports.com? I can recall reading about Pillreports.com a few times but that was years ago. It’s not surprising though since Pillreports.com has been around for nearly 10 years. So why is this news all of a sudden? There’s nothing new to report except a few comments from Drug and Alcohol Services (South Australia) executive director Keith Evans and SA Detective Inspector John De Candia. And what was the important message that commanded a whole article in a city newspaper ... Drugs are Bad mmkay! Oh, and a threat of life in jail if you are “carrying commercial and large commercial quantities” of illegal drugs. I must acknowledge Keith Evans and John De Candia though for the advice that seeking information from Pillreports.com might be rife with danger. Since the government flatly refuses to offer pill testing services (a decision they both support), the alternative is to pop away and hope for the best. Thanks for the safety tip fellas.

However you interpret the article, it’s still old news.

Pill Poppers Sharing Drug Reviews Online
Drug Users Issue Ecstasy Warning
Deadly New Mix Of Nye Party Drugs
Drug Takers Use Web To Find Best Deals For Cocaine, Ice, Heroin, Ecstasy

Inthemix.com.au wrote about news.com.au and their article, Pill Poppers Sharing Drug Reviews Online back in July 2008. It’s a great insight into how news.com.au source their information.

Pillreports.com is an international website run by Enlighten Harm Reduction, a lobbyist organisation in Melbourne. Please check them out as they provide some excellent services.

Drug Dealers And Users Can Google Up A Few Hits
Adelaide Advertiser
By Ben Harvy and Lauren Zwaans
October 2009


A WEBSITE acting as an open forum for ecstasy dealers and users is exposing the truth about Adelaide's drug underworld.

The pillreports.com website contains conversations between people about their experiences with drugs and the latest pills to hit the streets.

On the website, there are candid recommendations between users on what pills they deem "safe" to try, which is worrying experts.

Drug and Alcohol Services South Australia executive director Keith Evans said there was a cultural phenomenon emerging in which people saw themselves as "experts".

"It's a really worrying trend - the sort of culture that says `I got it from Jim. Everybody who's got their stuff from Jim has said Jim's stuff is good and therefore ipso facto I believe Jim's stuff is good, we'll all search out Jim'," he said.

"The reality isn't like that.

"Where Jim happens to have got it (the drugs) from will differ and even if you take out the legal consequences of it, you're always taking a gamble - it's Russian roulette."

The most recent Adelaide update on the pillreports website was submitted by user machetevip: "I'm going to be trying these Saturday night (ecstasy pills) and will update with a user report but so far these are looking quite good," he wrote.

A subsequent report detailed a timeline of machetevip's experience on the drugs.

"I was dancing and chatty and had some nice feelings on them," machetevip said.

There were 12 responses to the user report.

But Detective Inspector John De Candia said the health and legal consequences of illicit drug taking remained.

"Just because they're buying from the same seller does not mean they're buying from the same batch," he said. "It does not provide them any safeguards."

He said trafficking penalties in Australia for carrying commercial and large commercial quantities could result in "hefty penalties" ranging from 15 years to life imprisonment.

Oops! Adelaide Advertiser Gets It Right

That would be right, wouldn’t it. Just as I criticise Murdoch’s trashy newspapers for never being rational about drug policy and treating drug use as a moral issue, I find this beauty. I have to say that agreeing with an article in the Adelaide Advertiser about drugs is a unique experience and something to be shared with my grandchildren. Even more surprising are the reader’s comments. I could be wrong but I didn’t read one comment that disagreed with Tory Shepherd’s piece. It may be a few months old now but the article was in the first wave of the current trend to question why morality in the basis of drug policy and the failure of prohibition. How did the Adelaide Advertiser let this one through?

Great stuff, Tory!

Drugs Aren't Evil, So Stop The Moralising
By Tory Shepherd
Adelaide Advertiser
June 2009


People have been getting high for thousands of years, and there's nothing that will stop them.

They seek out different states of mind for different reasons - they want to experiment or escape or feel pleasure or avoid pain.

Poor old Wacko Jacko chose legal drugs - lots of them - and he wasn't alone.

People are endlessly inventive. They will always find a different sort of poison to self-medicate with. If they can't get alcopops, they'll get cheap wine.

If they can't get cheap wine, they'll make moonshine rum.

If they can't make moonshine rum, they'll drink something else.

If people can't get speed on the streets, they'll run a car through a chemist's window and steal cold and flu tablets and make their own.

They'll smoke plants they find in their back yard or help themselves to a parent's medicine cabinet.

Or if they have the time and the money they'll doctor-shop - like Michael Jackson reportedly did - and get myriad bottles of colourful pills made to bring you up or pull you down, and they will concoct their own special way to get out of touch with reality.

They always have.

People have been getting high for as long as they've been making music and it's about time we stopped thinking of drug taking as a dirty disgrace and start treating it as a public health issue.

Opium, cannabis and hallucinogens have been important parts of trade, of history, of religious and spiritual enlightenment.

Some of our best musicians were addicted to drugs or used them for inspirational flights of fancy. Poets, writers and philosophers - from Keats to Shelley - took opium.

Society is full of functioning drug users who look at gritty black-and-white ads telling them that speed will make them dig up the skin on their arms and feel nothing, because that is not them.

Drugs are not some pure evil.

They are chemicals used for various ends by a wide range of people.

Sometimes, those people are in dire mental straits and need all the help they can get to deal with their inner demons. Sometimes, people mess around and try a few things, then move on and have a productive and useful life.

The effect of drug addiction on a person's life can be devastating.

So can binging. Anyone who has had a serious hangover with all its shaking anxiety and pervasive toxicity, knows alcohol is a drug - and a depressive one at that.

Emergency specialists will tell of the toll the serious amphetamines take - the violence, the wild and unwieldy aggression.

But most of them also say alcohol is worse, that it is the bigger evil.

Drugs have a long and rich social history, but they have become a moral battleground.

While we condemn these drugs on the one hand, declare war on them, compete to be the very toughest on drugs that we can be, we allow other drugs to become a normal part of life. We normalise the pills and potions made by those other drug lords, Big Pharma.

Governments have to be seen to be doing something.

So they do something. They act tough on illicit drugs. But it's not proving to be the right thing.

Prohibition of alcohol did not work, and neither did zero tolerance. It's pointless and expensive to try banning drugs.

The only realistic approach is to work out the point at which it starts destroying lives and impacting communities and tackle that.

We need to listen to the people who are studying why people are ruining their own lives with drugs - whether they are drugs bought from a stinking back alley or a man in a white coat.

What is it in people's lives that drive them to self-destruct on alcohol or on Demerol or on ice?

Society has categorised drugs, but the categories they have chosen are moral, not medical, and that needs to change.

Related Articles:
Fairfax Media Fights the Good Fight
Journalist Should Be Ashamed
Journalist's Shame
Piers Akerman, His Readers, Oxycodone and The Truth
Did They Really Say That? Part 1 - The Media
The Australian Newspaper At It's Worst
Drug Hysteria - Headlines from News Ltd

Adelaide Advertiser has a Headline Overdose

You have to love those cwazy, wacky media folks. Joyfully and playfully thinking up enticing and alluring headlines to hook the reader in. Rascals. In a media scoop, it seems news.com has uncovered a sinister, underground drug dealer network which led the wascally news team at Adelaide Advertiser to headline an article:

Web Deals: Crims Get Cheap SA Drugs Online

But the headline was a fizzer. The article was just a revamp of a story published on several other News Ltd websites albeit with their own unique headline. Sadly for The Advertiser, these forums have been around for many years and were for information only, there was no mention of “crims” anywhere in the story, the drug prices were not cheap, it was not SA specific and there was no deals done online. The headline in it’s edited form should be:

Web XXXXX: XXXX XXX XXXXX XX XXXX Online

That’s better.


A summary from one reader:

Err the headline says "Crims get cheap SA drugs online" yet after reading the whole article there is no mention of this...
-Posted by: Jim Raynor

--

Drug takers use web to find cheapest drug deals
Mark Schliebs
Adelaide Now
January 2009

ONLINE social networks are being used to compare drug prices with Adelaide users paying the cheapest prices of all capital cities for cannabis, cocaine and ice.

An online survey found that the social networks were letting users shop around as if they were buying legal consumer goods. The secretive online forums are run according to strict guidelines and come with a warning to users not to incriminate themselves by admitting to possessing or selling drugs.

The discussions provide an underground snapshot of the local drugs markets and how they compare to those overseas, with recent threads revealing:

AUSTRALIA is one of the most expensive markets for illegal drugs in the world

BRISBANE is the most expensive city in the country for speed, ice, cocaine and LSD

ADELAIDE users pay less than those in other capital cities for cannabis, cocaine and ice

SYDNEY appears to be the cheapest market for ecstasy and speed.

As well as forensic discussions of pricing, one thread offers a critique of the pills produced by Underbelly's Carl Williams and another Melbourne identity and recalls private anecdotes from the times.
"They made the S**TTEST pills in Melbourne," one user said. "The pills Carl made were (methamphetamine) and ketamine. (The associate's) were often pink or red foxes, Carl's varied."

These self-described harm minimisation forums have been discussing price variations with their international counterparts for several years.

How it works
The rules at the start of the price thread state:

1) PRICES ONLY - No comments about how "you're paying too much for that" or "damn, where you get that hookup?

2) NO D**K-SIZING- You might have a really good hookup, or you might not, so post about how you get ecstasy pills for $2 each - you're not impressing anyone, and NO ONE will even reply to you - why? See rule #1

3) BE REALISTIC - don't post "I get 75,000 pills for about $3 each" - the price may be right but no one who is doing that kind of volume needs to inquire about prices here.

4) DO NOT INCRIMINATE YOURSELF OF ANY ILLEGAL ACTIVITY - remember, this is what you would pay for drugs. DO NOT ADMIT TO POSSESSING OR SELLING.

5) USE ACCURATE LANGUAGE - Post in terms we ALL KNOW - it's not a "jar" or a "sack" or a "quarter" or a "lick" or a "wrap" - if you use such terms, then GIVE THE AMOUNT WITHIN.

In the first weeks of 2009, users from Australia, America, Britain, Canada, Finland, Germany and Argentina have already started updating drug prices from previous years.
The first local on this year's price thread a user identified only as drug mentor has posted: "Yeah, first Aussie to get in on 2009 :P! I'm in Melbourne Australia. I know prices for other s**t but that's all I have been quoted on in 2009, I post more detailed prices in 2008 thread and for the most part they haven't changed."

High prices
A Belgian user said he was shocked to see how relatively costly buying illegal drugs in Australia was.
"Wow those Aus prices keep shocking me," the man posted.
"Does it really cost that much to import those drugs across the water, or are there only a few big players that dominate the market and set the prices? Maybe because of harsh penalties?"
A drug user in Melbourne responded that "Australia's border security is much tighter than other countries: I'd say it has something to do with us being an island and having extremely tight Customs and border control."
"I've heard we have some of the most tightest in the world, so obviously the distributors on the higher end of the chain, or the people that are responsible for 'transporting' the drugs to over here, are going to charge a pretty hefty surcharge for the hassle.
"Also, the fact that our country isn't anywhere near as heavily populated as United Kingdom, or the United States means that the demand isn't as great, therefore not being as much bulk as say, what there would be in America, etc..."

The Australian forum member went on to detail the prices for illegal drugs in their suburb.

Breakdown
Nationally, users report increases in the price of a 3.5g bag of cannabis in recent years, while the amount paid for a point or 0.1g of ice has fallen. The cost of ecstasy pills in Adelaide and Melbourne fell by $5 in the first half of 2008, while prices increased slightly in Sydney and stayed stagnant in Brisbane. But not all prices in every capital city have been updated on a constant basis. In Perth, users have reported paying a similar amount for cannabis in 2008 that buyers in other cities have. But only limited information on other drugs has been uploaded by West Australians in recent years.