Advice for Recreational Drug Users

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Published on Wednesday, 30 October 2013 05:29

Eros Association Researcher, Nick Wallis

Drug prohibition in Australia is blindly lurching its way toward new lows. Queensland, New South Wales and now South Australia have all introduced extensive drug prohibition laws based on this century’s ‘Reefer Madness’ - the Synthetic Scare. This has in turn led to a chemical arms race, a battle of innovation between legislators and chemists.

What on Earth is a ‘synthetic drug’, anyway? And what’s it got to do with the price of fish apart from being a political Red Herring.

Let’s clarify a few of the terms used in the debate.

Something is defined as ‘synthetic’ if it has simply been created by the combination of two or more parts. Although this can happen naturally, we assume in this context that we are referring to things that have been created by humans. This means that a synthetic drug is any drug that humans have created, rather than harvested directly from an organism. How many of your medicines do you think were harvested directly from an organism? Unless you’re a purely herbal remedies sort of person, then the answer is: Hardly any.

The potentially more loaded word in our fishy-phrase-game is ‘drug’.

The word comes loaded with all sorts of assumptions. Drugs are bad, right?

The word ‘drug’ has many different uses, two of the most useful definitions are:

1. That which refers to a substance used for medical purposes.

2. That which creates an effect on the central nervous system.

Neither of these two dictionary definitions suggests whether a drug is good or bad. However the third meaning is at the centre of the problem.

3. To refer to a specific set of government-categorised substances that have been deemed too harmful for humans in the society to access.

This suggests that there is an inherent evil to these but it only does so because the government said that was the case at some point in history. The history of drug law is not favourable to evidence or science and is plagued by controversies. Using the word ‘drug’ in this way without reflection on what it actually refers to, makes it very easy to wield a linguistics as a weapon.

Risk is inherent in life. It is a fundamental, inescapable part of life because the future is always unknown. Human brains are very good at predicting aspects of the future, especially where certain patterns are clear. We are therefore able to mitigate many of the risks around us by setting up rules and guidelines. Government legislation works because it’s (usually) all about mitigating the risks associated with two or more parties, where rules and guidelines allow us all common-ground in the game of life.

The consumption of a chemical or plant that alters the way we perceive things is an age-old human tradition. Most cultures have a long history with something psychoactive. The most prominent one in our culture is the all-pervasive alcohol. The consumption of many drugs in a historical sense, was often held in high esteem; to be part of a celebration, divination or ceremony of some sort. Some have been used for practical purposes. To focus attention or revive flagging energy levels or as part of a healing process.

Over 18,000,000 Australians regularly enjoy alcohol, more than two million Australians regularly enjoy cannabis and over half a million of us take MDMA (ecstasy) regularly. Other substances are less widely used on a regular basis but many people experiment with psychoactive substances at some point in their life.

These ‘drugs’ (third meaning – not alcohol) have been prohibited and defined as things which have an unacceptable risk to health. But there is no consistent evidence-base for measuring what is an ‘unacceptable’ risk, so what we end up with is an arbitrary collection of vastly different chemicals, plants and fungi. All things that some portion of the Australian population want to take – and not because they’re looking to screw up their lives, but most often for many of the same reasons that humans have always consumed psychoactive things.

Enter, human ingenuity!

Because the legislation that surrounds ‘drugs’ (number three again) is all about prohibition and punishment but demand for drugs still remains, people have figured out how to hack the brain’s chemistry with new, slightly different substances.

These are the ‘synthetic drugs’. New chemicals that have been created to unlock similar parts of the brain like other drugs do. And sometimes, new chemicals are created because they might do something to some part of the brain that’s kind of interesting.

Some of the synthetic drugs aren’t so new, like LSD which was accidentally synthesised by a Swiss chemist back in the late 1930’s, or MDMA which was synthesised back in the early 1910’s but its psychoactive potential wasn’t fully realised until Alexander Shulgin was alerted to it in 1967. We’re just way better at doing this now, with better scientific understanding and better equipment.

And now... now it’s a race. A chemical arms race to create newer and newer substances that keep getting around the law. All reason has been thrown out the door, because we have imaginary depictions of what ‘drugs’ are and do (that damned third meaning again). Politicians don’t talk sensibly about mitigating risks, instead they go for easy and populist options. The more prohibition that is introduced, the more absurd the race becomes and those who will feel the detrimental impact the most are those who want the freedom to determine their own consciousness and not some daggy Christian politician.