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PYOTR PATRUSHEV considers some radical new thinking about drug addiction in the world's worst-affected nation.

ARE DRUGS EXPERIMENTING WITH HUMANS?

I BELIEVE that the only long-term way to win the drug war is to introduce drug use into the classroom as a legitimate subject starting with, say, Grade 9.

I am not speaking out of total ignorance, and  only  partly tongue-in-cheek. For, during my recent trip to the US, I have taken an active part in the drug war, in the role, alas, of a civilian casualty.

I was walking along Sutler Street in San Francisco, in broad daylight, close to the usually safe Japantown. A gang of black youths were walking in the opposite direction. They were well-fed and dressed in smart track suits and casual clothes — not your usual derelict types who would push the streetwise button of a visitor.

I made eye contact with one of them, as he was trying to attract my attention by wild gesticulation. What happened next was a blur of movement and pain. I was kicked in the stomach and punched in the eye. As I fell to the ground, I saw the youths run.

They were not interested in my money. They were not muggers. They were high, possibly on crack. They were engaging in a self-designed, juvenile "hit-a-white-and-get-away-with-it" ini­tiation ritual. I just happened lo be the bloke with the whitest skin on the block.

I am not saying that the drug problem is in any way a racial problem. Heavy use of drugs by blacks is only one of its many facets. It is true that in the Highland Hospital in Oakland, in the San Francisco Bay Area, 45 per cent of all randomly tested, mostly black, patients showed crack metabolites in their blood.

It is also true that in New York, 73 per cent of arrested women, again mostly black, tested positive for cocaine. Equally true, drug use in perhaps less eye-catching fashion, affects all races and ill strata of the community in the US as it does elsewhere.

What I found out through this bitter personal experience is that the drug war, unleashed initially by the ebulliently optimistic if hare-brained Nixon, has left one with no place to hide.

Thinking of the staid Berkeley City Council's suggestion to introduce snifter dogs into the streets and homes of this university town, I appreciated the relative safety of Australia. And I wondered how long it would last.

Could we learn something from the American experience? This year, the US Government earmarked a staggering $US8 billion ($A10.25 billion) for drug war. This sounds like a lot of money, until we learn that the illicit drug trade will net the equivalent of the entire Federal Budget deficit in the same year - a cool $US150 billion.

Yet, only a small percentage - 5 to 7 percent — of heroin and cocaine traffic crossing the border will be intercepted. These days it costs $US2 million lo catch and jail a single drug smuggler, plus around $US18.000 a year to keep him in custody for 10 to 20 years. As one prominent American columnist had suggested, it would be cheaper — as well as much easier, although not as glamorous — to BUY smugglers off the street at $US2 million a shot and to allow them a comfortable retirement in Miami.

But even if the law enforcement agencies significantly cut the cocaine and heroin supply routes — which is unlikely — they will not snuff the demand. Just as the barons of the Medellin cartel in Bogota seem to be beating a temporary retreat, Asian and other cartels are coming on to the market with a new smokable form of amphetamine (called "ice"), which is far more addictive and easier to smuggle and manufacture locally than cocaine-derived crack.

A leading US psychоpharmacologist and drug expert, Dr Ronald Siegel of UCLA, joined recently the growing band of specialists who say we cannot stop the drug use, only learn to control it. He calls the use of plant-derived psychoactive substances (of which alcohol is an example) "the fourth natural drive" and proves that it is as widespread in the animal kingdom as it is in the human and had been throughout evolution.

He goes as far as to suggest that we may need to design better and safer psychoactive drugs and ways of using them rather than trying simply to prohibit their use.

The major problem with the current generation of drugs, experts such as Ron Siegel argue, is their illegality, their incredible potency (itself a product of science wreaking its belated revenge on man's presumptuous brain), and the abysmal ignorance of both the users and the controllers of use about the evolutionary nature and purpose of drug experience.

Drugs are now recognized as problem number one both in the US and in Australia, ahead of even such terrors as crime and inflation, and far ahead of war. Yet our response to this problem has been, it seems, somewhat myopic.

The proposed legalization of drugs, which is regarded by some as enlightened, only perpetuates the problem of ignorant and health-damaging abuse, sacrificing large portions of the population, mostly young, for the relative peace of the rest.

An old Sufi tale says: "You can only use what you have learnt to use." It advises to train the genie to obey your commands before you let him out of the bottle.

An ethnobotanical expert in the US has suggested that human culture is in fact shaped by the historical interaction of people and plants, including psycho-active plants. Man, he said, might be just an experiment by plants, and, moreover, one that is a cause for grave concern to the rest of the biosphere. 

This is less whimsical than it sounds when we recall that such major social upheavals as slavery and opium wars were precipitated by man's uncontrollable addiction to white sugar, tea and, finally, the extract of a poppy plant.

Coca-dollars are now a major political factor in the financial world. Just to think what a tobacco plant has done to humanity's health and finances boggles one's mind.

Other experts tell us that if you dig at the root of all modern religions you will find a plant-derived ritual. Plants were used for vision quests and initiations, thereby forging the link between the established cultural tradition and the aspirations of the young generation.

Can we put a claim lo be at least as intelligent as plants, so that we can reverse the direction of our war on drugs — which is actually an unmitigated retreat — and take some charge of the experiment being supposedly carried out by intelligent plants on our incumbent civilisation?

Can we see in 25 years' time (or is it 10, or five?) school kits with homeopathic or superdiluted extracts of psychoactive plants from all over the world being available for experimentation, together with detailed description of plant action and their ritual use?

Can we see our teachers of psychology finally being able to explain and possibly guide not just the behaviour of rats in a maze, but the craving Gutenberg felt for fermented grapes whose juice made him see an image of the printing press for the first time, thus initiating one of the most significant revolutions in human history?

Can we see field trips to the Amazonian jungle and the forests of Siberia or North Queensland (were there still such in existence) to discover the ethnobotanical lore and traditions, which have guided intelligent use of psychoactive plans throughout millennia?

Or shall we simply buy more radars and high-speed chase boats and give police robotised battering-rams to break reinforced doors of crack or "ice" — or whatever — dens''?

We have come a long way from the drug paranoia of the 50s to the rebellious euphoria of the 60s to the sober pragmatism of the late-80s. We have learnt that drug epidemics, as well as interest rates surges and recessions', come in waves whose laws seem, at this stage, more familiar to plants than to our human planners. Perhaps the time has come to study them as a legitimate subject without the fear and prejudice they usually provoke.