“Every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become.”
This sublime paragraph came from the American writer James Baldwin, who would have turned 100 this year. It came to mind with the waste water analysis this week suggesting Australians consumed four tonnes of cocaine in 2022-23. What miracles. What disasters.
Illustration by Simon LetchCredit:
Four tonnes. Holy smoke! Two tonnes of it in the “premier state” alone! One tonne found in the waste water beneath the Beach Hotel in Bondi! (OK, I made that last bit up.)
How much coke can one country put up its nose? Four tonnes sounds a lot. “That’s an amazing quantity, a very, very high figure,” said Shane Neilson of the Australian Crime Intelligence Commission, which conducted the survey. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to justify the Australian Federal Police’s existence.
When a five-kilogram brick washes up on a beach, or police announce a 50-kilogram seizure, or a well-known person is sprung on Instagram chopping up a “white powder”, you do wonder about the size of the iceberg beneath that tip. There must be tonnes of this stuff blowing about. And so there are: four tonnes.
On closer analysis, however, those four tonnes are not quite as alarming as they seem. Two tonnes used in NSW means two million grams. According to the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, one in 20 NSW residents admits to using cocaine. That’s 400,000 people, which sounds a little high to me, but let’s allow it.
If 400,000 NSW residents are doing two million grams, then on average they are using five grams a year. Five grams equates to 50 lines, or so I’m told. A fairly big boogie night for an average person might mean half a gram. So that means our 400,000 coke heads are having 10 big nights per year, or fewer than one a month. Which sounds a lot less Scarface.
Around one million Australians used cocaine in the past 12 months.
Moral panic around drug use is both an old and a new story. It’s new in that more countries are decriminalising psychoactive substances and entering the debate on how far they should take it. Having visited Los Angeles and New York last year, my question is not so much how far they have let it run but how – if the experiment is found to have failed on health, law enforcement and economic grounds – they propose to wind it back. The USA is a country in full-blown escapism, which might explain why so many of them will vote for Donald Trump.
Our sewers are awash with cocaine, but this isn’t a story of effluence
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15.03.2024
“Every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become.”
This sublime paragraph came from the American writer James Baldwin, who would have turned 100 this year. It came to mind with the waste water analysis this week suggesting Australians consumed four tonnes of cocaine in 2022-23. What miracles. What disasters.
Illustration by Simon LetchCredit:
Four tonnes. Holy smoke! Two tonnes of it in the “premier state” alone! One tonne found in the waste water beneath the Beach Hotel in Bondi! (OK, I made that........
© The Sydney Morning Herald
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