About Us | Publications | Mailing List | Initiatives | Donations

Simon Castles

"Rich or Poor, A Junkie is A Junkie"

The Age

January 27, 2000

Alcoholics who are poor or homeless get called a lot of things, none very flattering. 'Alkie', 'wino', 'hobo', 'drunk' and 'bum', are just a few of the names dished out, invariably with a good deal of derision. Rich alcoholics, on the other hand - particularly those we call 'socialites' - tend to receive much better treatment. They are 'spirited', 'fun-loving' and 'bubbly'.

 Why do we make this distinction? Is drug abuse somehow more acceptable for the rich? At some level, do we believe the well-off have earned the right to drink to excess? After all, they've worked hard to get where they are and if they have to down a few drinks (and then a few more) in order to relax, well, that's fair enough.

 Arguably, the drinking habits of the poor are frowned upon to a greater extent because they are so much more visible than those of the rich. Intoxication at a private function is one thing, on a street corner quite another.

 Similar contradictions exist in our attitudes to 'harder' drugs. When friends of mine - well-dressed and middle class - express surprise at being offered heroin on Russell Street, my first thought is that clearly the dealers must be having plenty of success selling to people who 'look' similar to me and my friends. After all, there is no shortage of evidence heroin addiction afflicts people from a range of backgrounds and classes. And all users must get their heroin from somewhere.

 But our ideas about what a heroin addict 'looks like' are skewed by what we see on the streets. At $20 for a cap of heroin, there is clearly a large population of poor people - many homeless - stuck in an endless and very visible cycle of shooting up, begging and stealing their way to another $20, then shooting up again. But when it comes to the total population of heroin addicts, surely these indigents are just the tip of a very large iceberg. We do not see - and therefore tend to forget about - the more 'normal' looking users who are shooting up in staff toilets, private offices, hotel rooms and in the comfort of their own homes.

 Surely one of the reasons we don't seem to hear much about a drug such as cocaine in this country is because it isn't very visible - i.e. at $250 a gram, it is (at present, anyway) out of the price range of many of the people who live, or spend a lot of time, on inner-city streets. Cocaine is a drug for the wealthy; for those in the entertainment, fashion and - if the rumours are to be believed - legal fields. It is a drug enjoyed behind closed doors. When cocaine is used more publicly - a recent report in The Age referred to revellers at a charity ball openly 'powdering their noses' - it is not as though a huge police presence is on hand to put a stop to the party.

 It is true cocaine is not leading to overdose deaths in anything like the numbers heroin is, and this is undoubtedly one of the reasons why so little public, media and police attention is paid to the drug. But when you consider that, according to a study by the Judicial Commission of NSW, cocaine has now overtaken heroin as the most common drug to be imported into Australia, the relative silence surrounding cocaine is clearly in stark contrast to its availability and popularity. As a senior detective told The Age recently: 'We've found more coke in the last two years than in the previous 10, and we aren't really out there looking for it.'

 What the lack of attention to a drug which is clearly very popular in certain circles does show is that - while we might not like to admit it - our attitudes to individual drugs is influenced by the sorts of people who use that drug. It is naive to pretend we judge the threats to society of heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, marijuana, even tobacco and alcohol, purely on the relative real dangers of those substances.

 Late last year, anecdotal evidence began to emerge that caps of cocaine were now being sold in Melbourne for as little as $50. And in Sydney, drug agencies recently expressed concern that cocaine is becoming more popular with the street-injecting community. If cocaine is indeed breaking out of upmarket club and party scene, out of the domain of the exclusive professions, and becoming more popular with poorer members of the community, then I suggest we will hear a lot more about cocaine - and just how dangerous it is to individuals and to society as a whole - in the years ahead.