Miranda Devine –, Saturday, February, 08, 2014, (10:57pm)
THREE days after Philip Seymour Hoffman died with a needle in his arm, Hollywood was putting up giant billboards spruiking its drug-glamourising Oscar prospect Wolf Of Wall Street.
The words “because it’s awesome!” appear over an image of Leo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill in one of the many scenes in which they are high as kites and having a whale of a time.
The “awesome” quote comes from DiCaprio’s real life character, Wall Street fraudster Jordan Belfort: “I use Xanax to stay focused, Ambien to sleep, pot to mellow out, cocaine to wake up and morphine … because it’s awesome.”
Young men in one Sydney movie theatre could be heard saying: “This is sick” (excellent), as Belfort and pals snorted cocaine, popped pills, smoked crack and screwed hookers.
This is a problem, in case you haven’t noticed.Illicit drug use is rife as Baby Boomers take their habits into old age and Gen Y launches a new era of excess.
And the problem, for some reason, is now worse in Australia than in any other developed country, according to a 2012 UN report.
In Sydney, cocaine busts have reportedly doubled in a year, with mothers in Double Bay restaurants snorting lines in the toilet before the school run.
A study in the Medical Journal of Australia last September found ambulance call-outs for crystal meth, aka ice, had tripled in two years.
When the Howard government launched its Tough on Drugs strategy in 1997, drug use plummeted for the first time in three decades. Best of all, teenage drug experimentation fell, according to the Australian Secondary School Students Alcohol and Drug Survey.
But then a new laissez faire government arrived, and the figures show drug use rose steadily from 2008.
We now demonise the legal drugs tobacco and alcohol. Yet we turn a blind eye to the illicit drugs which are increasingly glamourised by Hollywood and pop culture.
You can’t smoke a cigarette on the silver screen but the Wolf of Wall Street can snort coke out of a prostitute’s anus. If it’s not DiCaprio giving new meaning to crack cocaine, it’s Miley Cyrus singing to her tween fans about Molly, aka MDMA.
There’s something seriously wrong when the medical establishment is biased towards legalising drugs while railing against alcohol.
Last week, after Hoffman died from heroin, Australia’s chief drug liberaliser, Dr Alex Wodak, was still using the good name of St Vincent’s Hospital, where he is “emeritus consultant” to downplay the dangers. Heroin, he told the ABC, could be used recreationally.
“It’s a risk, no doubt about it,” Dr Wodak said. “But there are also people who go on and use and have very functional, creative, significant lives where they contribute to the community and continue to use heroin from time to time.”
Right on cue, The Guardian published an article claiming it wasn’t heroin but the prohibition on drugs that caused Hoffman’s death.
You could hardly send a more dangerous message at a time when authorities in Australia fear a return of the heroin epidemic of the 1990s.
A more realistic response came from Hoffman’s friend, scriptwriter and recovering addict Aaron Sorkin, who wrote last week that Hoffman “did not die from an overdose of heroin - he died from heroin”.
“We should stop implying that if he’d just taken the proper amount then everything would have been fine,” Sorkin said.
Hoffman once told Sorkin: “If one of us dies of an overdose, probably 10 people who were about to won’t.”
In other words, “our deaths would make news and maybe scare someone clean”.
But even if Hoffman’s death did save 10 lives, it’s nothing to the legions of people switched onto the glamour of drugs this Oscar season by Martin Scorsese’s shameful movie.
I’ve interviewed heroin addicts trying to break free with naltrexone treatment.
The only emotion they expressed was anger that the government had been so slack on drug law enforcement in the 1990s when they became hooked as teenagers, catching the so-called “smack express” train to Cabramatta to openly score. It was so easy, and they were left with a lifelong affliction.
Now we’re doing it again; governments and police looking for the easy way out, happy to believe the lies of drug liberalisers and appease the drug-soaked chattering classes.
Meanwhile, the so-called alcohol-fuelled violence we are currently so worked up about ignores the fact that alcohol consumption is plummetting - we’re drinking less alcohol than we have in almost a decade, and 30 per cent less than the peak in 1974-75.
What has changed is the nature and extent of illicit drug use. Where alcohol is a depressant that makes you sleepy, stimulant drugs keep you alert to drink more and, sometimes, to become violent.
A decade ago John Howard showed you could change drug habits. But we gave up the war almost as soon as we started.
The words “because it’s awesome!” appear over an image of Leo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill in one of the many scenes in which they are high as kites and having a whale of a time.
The “awesome” quote comes from DiCaprio’s real life character, Wall Street fraudster Jordan Belfort: “I use Xanax to stay focused, Ambien to sleep, pot to mellow out, cocaine to wake up and morphine … because it’s awesome.”
Young men in one Sydney movie theatre could be heard saying: “This is sick” (excellent), as Belfort and pals snorted cocaine, popped pills, smoked crack and screwed hookers.
This is a problem, in case you haven’t noticed.Illicit drug use is rife as Baby Boomers take their habits into old age and Gen Y launches a new era of excess.
And the problem, for some reason, is now worse in Australia than in any other developed country, according to a 2012 UN report.
In Sydney, cocaine busts have reportedly doubled in a year, with mothers in Double Bay restaurants snorting lines in the toilet before the school run.
A study in the Medical Journal of Australia last September found ambulance call-outs for crystal meth, aka ice, had tripled in two years.
When the Howard government launched its Tough on Drugs strategy in 1997, drug use plummeted for the first time in three decades. Best of all, teenage drug experimentation fell, according to the Australian Secondary School Students Alcohol and Drug Survey.
But then a new laissez faire government arrived, and the figures show drug use rose steadily from 2008.
We now demonise the legal drugs tobacco and alcohol. Yet we turn a blind eye to the illicit drugs which are increasingly glamourised by Hollywood and pop culture.
You can’t smoke a cigarette on the silver screen but the Wolf of Wall Street can snort coke out of a prostitute’s anus. If it’s not DiCaprio giving new meaning to crack cocaine, it’s Miley Cyrus singing to her tween fans about Molly, aka MDMA.
There’s something seriously wrong when the medical establishment is biased towards legalising drugs while railing against alcohol.
Last week, after Hoffman died from heroin, Australia’s chief drug liberaliser, Dr Alex Wodak, was still using the good name of St Vincent’s Hospital, where he is “emeritus consultant” to downplay the dangers. Heroin, he told the ABC, could be used recreationally.
“It’s a risk, no doubt about it,” Dr Wodak said. “But there are also people who go on and use and have very functional, creative, significant lives where they contribute to the community and continue to use heroin from time to time.”
Right on cue, The Guardian published an article claiming it wasn’t heroin but the prohibition on drugs that caused Hoffman’s death.
You could hardly send a more dangerous message at a time when authorities in Australia fear a return of the heroin epidemic of the 1990s.
A more realistic response came from Hoffman’s friend, scriptwriter and recovering addict Aaron Sorkin, who wrote last week that Hoffman “did not die from an overdose of heroin - he died from heroin”.
“We should stop implying that if he’d just taken the proper amount then everything would have been fine,” Sorkin said.
Hoffman once told Sorkin: “If one of us dies of an overdose, probably 10 people who were about to won’t.”
In other words, “our deaths would make news and maybe scare someone clean”.
But even if Hoffman’s death did save 10 lives, it’s nothing to the legions of people switched onto the glamour of drugs this Oscar season by Martin Scorsese’s shameful movie.
I’ve interviewed heroin addicts trying to break free with naltrexone treatment.
The only emotion they expressed was anger that the government had been so slack on drug law enforcement in the 1990s when they became hooked as teenagers, catching the so-called “smack express” train to Cabramatta to openly score. It was so easy, and they were left with a lifelong affliction.
Now we’re doing it again; governments and police looking for the easy way out, happy to believe the lies of drug liberalisers and appease the drug-soaked chattering classes.
Meanwhile, the so-called alcohol-fuelled violence we are currently so worked up about ignores the fact that alcohol consumption is plummetting - we’re drinking less alcohol than we have in almost a decade, and 30 per cent less than the peak in 1974-75.
What has changed is the nature and extent of illicit drug use. Where alcohol is a depressant that makes you sleepy, stimulant drugs keep you alert to drink more and, sometimes, to become violent.
A decade ago John Howard showed you could change drug habits. But we gave up the war almost as soon as we started.
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