We humans are a predictable lot; we continually ignore history, are afraid of everything, and act emotionally rather than rationally, especially when it comes to the vexatious and controversial subject of drugs in society. We don’t learn from our mistakes; destined to repeat them over and over on a recurring loop of denial. Wash over some orchestrated religious propaganda and you have a recipe for disaster. The author of the recently released autobiography; “Cheating the Hangman: True Confessions of a Heroin Trafficker” knows what he’s talking about when it comes to illegal drugs. Wade Agnew has been using them daily for forty years. He started with alcohol, quickly dismissing it after the revelation of marijuana in 1968 while at University. This discovery would dictate the course of his life. For all the details of his terrifyingly authentic tale go to; http://www.cheatingthehangman.com.au/home_book.html
That the “War on Drugs” was the brainchild of the Nixon administration; the most seriously paranoid US president of the 20th Century, tells us a great deal about its genesis and “raison d’etre”. Every society that has existed since the beginning of time has used “consciousness altering” substances, often in highly spiritual circumstances. This should have told us something, but apparently not. Ignorance and political ambition are a volatile mix. At the start of the 21st Century, Australia was experiencing a flood of heroin. Established by refugees after the war in S.E.Asia, the Vietnamese community was now well integrated into mainstream society. Many of these citizens were ethnic Chinese with strong family links back to their homeland. With the opening up of the post-war Viet Nam, they became the conduit for Thai and Burmese white powder heroin then flooding into Australia. This community was very wary of officialdom, and notoriously difficult to penetrate. As a consequence the country was experiencing a huge drop in the price of heroin on the streets of major cities. It even penetrated far flung inland country towns. The price per gram fell to unprecedented lows, and the purity was astounding high by world standards.
“I was well and truly retired by then, and could only look on with envy as no4 white powder flooded into Australian cities,” says Wade from his home in Brisbane. “People were making serious money from the glut of high quality heroin.” An unfortunate consequence of the high purity was a sharp rise in the number of overdoses on the streets of Australian cities. Addicts unused to such purity were dropping like flies. At one point police in Cabramatta; a Vietnamese enclave in western Sydney; now the heroin capital of the country, begged whoever was distributing a particularly pure shipment (close to 95%) to cut their drugs to curb the death rate. Not long after, the local market began to experience a serious heroin drought, and the conservative Australian government began crowing, claiming its “Tough on Drugs” policy had been responsible. This drought was quickly followed by an avalanche of Methamphetamines. This was no coincidence; the two phenomena were inextricably linked. It quickly became evident that the Australian Government was taking credit for decisions of criminals. The “War on Drugs” has little or no effect on the availability of illegal drugs on the streets of Australia or anywhere else for that matter. All it does is pump-prime organized crime, and turn otherwise law abiding citizens into criminals. The following are excerpts from a report into the heroin glut entitled; “The Case for an Inquiry into its Causes and the Flood of Methamphetamines” by W.M. Bush; no relation.
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