Drugs and Democracy provides a forum for a diverse range of views, but it is also a valuable snapshot of the current state of drug policy in Australia. Various of the authors offer up-to-date figures on the several hundreds of our fellow citizens who die from overdoses of illicit drugs every year, the several billions it costs us to fail to prevent their deaths, and the global political instability that follows in its wake. As Alex Wodak points out, in one of the most cogent and forcefully argued of the chapters, opioid deaths in Australia have risen from six in 1964 to 600 in 1997 or from 1.3 per million to 71.5 per million. He points out that this is the kind of success that in the corporate world leads to bankruptcy and, in the military world, to court martial. There are also very clear chapters here, particularly by Wodak, Anne Roche and Keith Evans, and David Crosbie on the meaning of ‘harm reduction’ strategies and how they are distinct from policies of supply reduction. Strictly speaking, as Roche and Evans inform us, the former refers only to ‘those policies and programs that attempted to reduce the risk of harm among people who continued to use drugs’. Crosbie shows that, since its adoption by Australian governments as official policy in 1985, the term has been rendered anodyne by overuse; and the authors remind us that, nevertheless, it implies a real content at odds with much police practice, government policy and political rhetoric.

Thus, Adam Sutton and Stephen James report on their important research into the actual application of ‘harm minimization’ by police forces throughout Australia. The authors demonstrate that there is a vast gulf between high-level rhetoric and front-line reality. Police squads, driven often enough by contempt for users’ criminality on the one hand, and the need to show adequate records of arrest and seizure on the other, are ‘struggling to orient [their] day to day efforts to a harm reduction framework’. Sutton and James emphasise what a difference it would make if harm reduction became the criteria by which to actually judge law enforcement efforts. How effective – as a way of reducing harm to drug users – are arrests, seizures and droughts in the availability of certain drugs? What if police were ‘oriented towards partnerships, problems and harm reduction, rather than being driven solely by intelligence data on local trafficking networks, or the conspicuous availability of a particular substance’? What, in other words, if the mantra of harm reduction were taken seriously?

Whatever prevents these changes, the book suggests, the problem is no longer a dearth of research. That was always the battle-cry of books like this ten or twenty years ago: let us only find out the truth. It is not so simple. We now have solid evidence of the failures of prohibition: sociological, epidemiological, and criminological. We do not need to know more; we need to better communicate what we know. Several contributors, in particular John Broome, a former head of the National Crime Authority, bemoan the influence of ‘ill-informed populism’ and ‘emotive vituperation’ on contemporary government policy. They are right so to do. But the key question remains: what makes the public, and especially politicians, so resistant to both expertise and common sense?

A sign of its times, Drugs and Democracy illustrates the weaknesses of drug-policy debate in this country no less than its strengths. First, there is virtually no discussion of the health risks of drug abuse in this book, or indeed of the health risks of drug laws. This is significant and worth reflecting on.

The editors set themselves the task of finding out ‘the extent of the contemporary drug problem in Australia’. But Peter Chalk, John McFarlane, and Paddy Mahoney, in particular, discuss instead the costs of law enforcement, and the social and economic threats associated with money laundering, narco-terrorism, geopolitical corruption. All these concerns are helpfully described by McFarlane as ‘security issues’.

This is a radical change. No longer does anyone really believe the old myths that illicit drugs were uniquely dangerous and evil in themselves. Quite a new way of thinking about drug problems is exhibited here. The real danger is seen to be global economic and political insecurity, not the illness of users and abusers. But the new villains are written about with equal emotion – narco-terrorists out to destroy our way of life, ‘outlaw motorcycle gangs’ and ‘ethnically-based crime groups’. The drug problem is still a battle between good and evil and, as a result, for many people and even for some of the contributors to this volume, our current drug laws are still perceived on the side of good.

Fear, blame and guilt underpin the drug debate, argues Timothy Rohl. In this emotionally fraught state, we have been blinded to that which the rhetorical shift from the evil of drugs to the evil of traffic should have made abundantly clear. It is not the substances themselves but the legal structure curtailing their use and trade that is solely responsible for these ‘security issues’. And if that is the case, then it is not just that law enforcement and harm reduction are complementary strategies: they are contradictory.

The second problem this book illustrates is how easy it is to avoid any sustained challenge to established dichotomies. The way in which harm reduction and law enforcement are treated as two sides of the same coin is an example. They are not: they are coins in different currencies. We cannot simply trade off a bit of one with some of the other. We must rather decide between them. Some of the chapters in this book bear that implication, but they rarely say so with adequate force.

So, too, one of the constant refrains in Drugs and Democracy is that ‘supply disruption and demand reduction’ remain the only two choices open to policymakers. Some writers advocate both; some rightly emphasise the failure of supply-side approaches and urge, as the alternative, that we ‘tackle drug abuse as a problem of demand’. But this misses the point. Both ‘supply disruption and demand reduction’ treat the problems of drug use as something that exists quite apart from the legal structure of international and national prohibition. Not so. The way in which drugs are supplied, used, and thought of, no less than the social problems which that supply causes and that demand creates, are all constituted by and in the context of the laws which render their use and possession illegal. Peter Chalk to the contrary, there are no ‘true causes and effects of drug abuse’. It all depends on the legal and social structure against which drug use takes place. And that is the question that is still to be seriously addressed.

Finally, as Andrew Parkin argues here, our society is committed to both liberalism and democracy – to the protection of individual rights and the maintenance of community norms. But there is an inherent tension here which the drug debate makes clear. ‘The community’ (Parkin argues well that even the term is a highly problematic assertion) may think of drug laws as a democratic expression of their own moral values but, in the process, the rights and freedoms of individual drug users are being undermined. But Parkin’s response seems to be a cry for tolerance as the core value that democracy and liberalism both share. I would have liked to see a more argumentative response. Indeed, there is a real institutional imbalance here. ‘Community values’ find vocal champions in powerful institutions ranging from talk-back radio all the way to parliament itself. But the institution dedicated to the protection of rights against democratic rhetoric, the judicial system, appears to be barred from entering into any public discourse in defence of its actions. The white noise of Laws and the silence of law are a serious problem.

The contributors to Drugs and Democracy raise some of these conflicts and choices. But in attempting to seize the lofty authority of neutrality, in succumbing to the dangerous chimera of balance, they do not confront them with enough clarity or vigour. Perhaps the next turn of the screw will do better.