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Simon Castles

'The Drug Trade's Real Attraction'

The Age

January 11, 2001

The staff at Hungry Jack’s on the corner of Russell and Bourke streets do it tough. Surely no workers anywhere in Melbourne do their thing in surroundings so charged with negative energy. There they are, in uniform and funny hat, bagging Whoppers and fries, while right outside the window all hell is breaking loose.

 This is the corner where drug deals are made and scores settled; where the threat of violence is as real as the ambulance parked on the footpath; where eyes are either cast down in loss or are darting about, seeking contact and a sale.

 It is also a corner where two economies — the mainstream and the underground — coexist in a fashion more blatant than anywhere else you’d care to imagine. 
 One economy for burgers and smiles. Another for drugs and denials.

 The sheer size of the illegal drugs industry is something you can’t ignore when you wander along Russell and into Bourke. The whispered call of “you chasin’?” seems to echo off the walls, tailing the weary pedestrian like a ghost every step of the way.
Granted, the dark rings that sit naturally under my eyes probably make me more of a target for drug dealers than most, but I swear I get more attention from salespeople on Russell Street than I ever get in Myer or David Jones.

 And this makes sense in a sad kind of way. For isn’t the market which supplies heroin, cocaine, ecstasy and marijuana to anyone and everyone who wants it just a dark mimicry of consumer capitalism at its most bold? A market with its own fluctuations in demand and supply? Its own need for labour?

 But we rarely think about the drugs issue in this way. Our concern is always centred on the dangerous attraction of the drugs themselves. The incredible appeal of drugs as an industry — particularly to those marginalised young people who don’t feel very welcome in the mainstream economy — is a subject too complex and loaded to want to enter into.
 So we limit our discussion of drug dealing to simple dismissals of the dealers as despicable human beings who support their own sickening habits by preying on the weak and vulnerable. End of story. 

 But such homespun commentary — while no doubt containing grains of truth — belies the size and complexity of the drugs industry in Australia.

 A recent survey, for instance, put the number of Australians who had used an illicit drug of one sort or another in a 12-month period at over 3,320,000. This figure is about equal to the population of Melbourne.

 Just what a market of this size means in terms of profits for the drugs industry is as staggering as it is carefully hidden. Recent estimates put turnover for marijuana alone at some $7 billion a year in Australia. This is more than wool and dairy exports combined.
 The attraction of such a booming industry for teenagers who have seen the number of full-time jobs available to them in the mainstream economy fall by more than 50 percent in the past decade must be dangerously real.

 I mean, how many windows of opportunity are there today for young people with less than 15 years of education behind them? The days of entry-level jobs in areas such as manufacturing, banking and the public service are nothing but a distant memory. In fact, for some 16-year-olds they’re not even that.

 Not to say the news is all bad in the unskilled labour market. There has been huge growth in recent years in casual employment in the service sector. Hungry Jack’s on the corner of Bourke and Russell is just one of 180 franchises of the burger chain sprinkled, like salt on fries, over every state and territory in Australia.

 And it is young people who grab these jobs in the fast food business. According to the Australian Retailers Association, more than 80 percent of those selling burgers, nuggets and hot apple pies are under 21. At McDonald’s, the percentage is even higher.
 But beyond the McJobs — the low-pay, no-future positions in the service sector — the employment outlook has never been dimmer for young people short on skills and experience than it is today. Within this dismal environment of reduced opportunity and fading hopes, the reasons not to sell drugs must seem awfully weak. After all, when you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.

 Down on Russell Street there are plenty of kids who have nothing. And just a couple of metres from where some teenager bags fries for Hungry Jack’s, another kid is busy dealing drugs for an industry with all the global reach of the burger chain, but many, many times the number of takeaway outlets.