Professor Desmond Manderson walks into rooms with his personality bursting at the seams. His eclectic style is at home at ANU Law School, a place he’s been tied to for almost 50 years. His latest book High Time: How Australia Changed Its Mind About Illegal Drugs, is a personal book and an academic text. It is full of natural humour that flows comfortably off the page, without taking away from its message about the issues we currently face with drugs in Australia.
High Time reflects on ‘how Australia changed its mind on drugs,’ and how the country went from drug laws founded in racism and driven by ideology, to a ‘harm minimisation’ approach. The work arcs back to his first book on the subject, with a lifetime of knowledge gained in-between, but highlights a thread of interest that has followed him throughout his career.
Desmond is an interdisciplinary scholar, who started at ANU Law School as an undergraduate in 1979, and began tutoring in 1984. At the end of his degrees he received funding though the National Campaign Against Drug Abuse (NCADA) to write his first book, ‘From Mr Sin to Mr Big: A history of Australian drug laws' (1993). It was an archival look at the history of Australian drug laws dating back to the late 1800s, showing how their origins had almost nothing to do with health or addiction, but were rooted in bigotry, class and societal fears.
His latest work now looks like a full circle back to this important topic. Desmond, however describes it slightly differently. “Looking down it looks like a circle, but from the side, it’s a spiral up in both skills, and who I am now as a person.” High Time ibrings the history of Australian drug laws right up to date , research which focused less on dusty archives and more on media sources, public records, and parliamentary debates.
“What makes it a good book is confidence to be myself, with both my voice and my interest,” he says.
Desmond is clear in his text: drugs are not the problem, it is the social issues that are driving people to use that are the problem. He tells the story about the post office in a small town being turned into a meth lab, but rather than succumbing to medial sensationalism, he focuses on why the town no longer has a post office, as symbolic of services being ripped from small towns. On this analysis, high levels of drug use in regional Australia are not the cause of social ills but the symptom.
Manderson strongly believes there is a stark difference between casual drug use, regular drug use, and problematic drug use, with the last what most people consider the only type. “Not all drug use equals harm,” he explains.
It’s the sympathetic perspective with which he writes about those who take drugs that gives his work such balance. “What is wrong with demonising people who use drugs is central to the book; we need to know where this attitude is coming from, and how it impacts policy decisions”, he tells us.
Each chapter focuses on a key moment, or drug, in Australia; from how Tasmania and its poppy fields contributed to the US opioid overdose crisis, to the rise of MDM, to vaping to the rapid explosion of medical marijuana use in Australia. Desmond explains that as recently as 2016 almost no-one could use medical marijuana legally. Once the laws changed, that number skyrocketed to 250,000 people in a little more than four years. Data presented without further context like this, could lead a reader to believe that a quarter of a million more people were consuming cannabis, however, based on the national drug surveys, this is not the case. Instead, people are just acquiring it legally.
This book, therefore, highlights the ongoing contest between drug prohibition and harm reduction policies, the dramatic effect that a range of legal reforms have made to the landscape of drug policy in Australia, and their continuing vulnerability to political headwinds.
“Radical changes in drug law have unfolded over the course of my professional life, with the result that I’m also writing about events in which I have sometimes been a participant as well as an observer,” Desmond writes in the first chapter.
Politics remains polaraising, ideological and opportunistic, and focused on sending messages rather than saving lives. He says that this continues to play merry havoc with decriminalisation, safe injecting rooms, pill testing and other harm reduction strategies.
“I wish to convince you that it is indeed ‘high time’ for Australia to make up its mind,” he concludes.
And the reviewers agree. “Don’t shy away from Manderson’s book, thinking it will be dry and academic, or that it will be wet and one-eyed. It is neither: it is social and political history in a literally vital area of policy. It should be on the desk of every member of every parliament in the nation,” writes lawyer Andrew Fraser.