High season
One political issue engages VICE ’s audience without fail: drugs. Here’s how we used a series of stories on drug law reform to engage readers around broader political issues such as racism, health and inequality.
A few months ago, I was sitting on a panel of youth media journalists when someone in the audience — who introduced himself as a “self-confessed middle-aged white man” — asked why young people in Australia aren’t engaged with politics. His kids seem apathetic, he explained, in comparison to his own generation that marched in the streets against the Vietnam War.
My time as a features editor at VICE has led me to believe this isn’t the reality. In fact, there’s one political issue that always engages our young audience, and that is drugs. I say political issue because, increasingly, that’s the lens through which our readers (young people, millennials, whatever you want to call to them) view drugs.
And it’s an issue they are willing to vote on.
Earlier this year, VICE ran a poll asking nearly 600 of our Australian readers a range of questions related to drugs and drug law reform. The results were clear: 86 per cent told us they would vote for someone who wanted to legalise illicit drugs for medicinal purposes. More than 64 per cent said they’d vote for a politician who backed total decriminalisation and regulation of drugs. To them, politicians who try to ignore the issue of drug law reform — or still actively support a zero tolerance policy — seem increasingly out of touch; unable to accept that the “War on Drugs” has failed.
Perhaps no issue has catalysed young Australians around drug law reform more than pill testing at music festivals. Over the past two years, our readers have followed closely as advocates including Dr David Caldicott, Dr Alex Wodak and Matt Noffs have tried to get a trial off the ground, only to hit political roadblocks at every turn. For our readership, it’s been deeply frustrating. To them, pill testing seems like common sense. People are going to take drugs — research from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare shows 43 per cent of Australian adults have in their lifetime — so minimising the risk is just a logical step.
But drug law reform that begins and ends with pill testing at music festivals — filled with punters who can afford a $300 ticket — isn’t really a revolution. It’s privilege in action. That’s why the VICE editorial team sat down at the start of this year to tackle a question we’d been mulling over for a while:
“Young people in Australia are having intelligent and nuanced conversations about pill testing. Can we use that to talk about drug law reform more broadly?”
What emerged was “High Season”, VICE ’s new series breaking down all the ways Australia’s drug laws are broken. It’s a broad remit, one that’s taken our writers all across the country. From Darwin, Ben Ansell reported on the growing trend of ‘rehab tourism’, where people desperate for drug treatment are moving from Melbourne to the Northern Territory. “In the NT, there are 158 publicly funded rehab beds, for a population of just under 212,000,” he explained. “Compare this to Victoria, which has 420 publicly funded drug rehab beds … in a state of nearly 5.8 million people.”
At the gates of the Rainbow Serpent music festival in country Victoria, Nevena Spirovska kept an eye on the police’s Police Passive Alert Detection dog operation, a tactic increasingly relied on by Victoria Police to patrol events frequented by young people. Her anecdotal research reflected the findings of our reader poll — faced with the sight of drug dogs at the festival gates, a third of young people said they’d swallow all their drugs in an attempt to avoid detection.
In Sydney’s courts, Liam Armstrong looked into Section 10s, part of the Crimes (Sentencing Procedure) Act 1999 that gives magistrates and judges the discretion to dismiss all charges against someone with no conviction recorded. Who’s more likely to get one, he asked, a kid from Sydney’s west or a uni student from the eastern beaches?
“There’s growing concern in the legal community that the likelihood of getting a Section 10 is determined more by your parents’ bank account than the chance you’ll reoffend,” Armstrong wrote, “that rich kids who can afford good lawyers stay out of the system, while young people without money get sucked into the cycle over minor possession charges.”
For anyone who’s ever read VICE, the idea that we’d write about drugs isn’t exactly groundbreaking. But “High Season” isn’t about taking acid and going to the Westminster Dog Show. It’s a series that seeks to educate our audience on all the issues drugs intersect with — public health, racial bias in policing, the structural inequality in Australia’s criminal justice system — not just reflecting back the opinions they’ve already forged.
“High Season” comes at a moment when the impact of Australia’s drug laws is in sharp focus. Last year, Australia’s prison population hit a 20-year high. Since 2010, the number of people jailed for illicit drug offences in Australia has jumped by 90 per cent. Over this same time, illicit drugs have gone from the fourth most common charge landing people in our prisons to the second.
Illicit drugs are actually the most common offence for women, one of the fastest growing groups in our prisons. In March, the report of the Victorian parliament’s Inquiry into Drug Law Reform called on the country’s second largest state to “remove criminal penalties for all illicit drug use and personal possession offences as a key area for drug law reform”.
When it comes to decriminalisation, whether “High Season” strays into the territory of advocacy journalism is an interesting question. It’s been an editorial choice to focus on the issue of drug law reform, and to use our platform to talk about the problems associated with our current system.
But we see the series more as the primer every millennial needs to read before they jump into an argument with a Baby Boomer about drug law reform. It’s a gateway, if you will, to pull young people into a broader conversation about the politics of racism, health and inequality in our country. It’s VICE saying that, in 2018, anyone looking at drugs solely as a partying issue — and not a political one — needs to grow up.
Maddison Connaughton is the Australian features editor at VICE.
Sam Wallman is a comics-journalist and unionist based at the Victorian Trades Hall. He is also a contributing editor to Overland Literary Journal. Illustrations appeared originally in the Victorian AIDS Council animated series Be-Longing for It.
Read more from the High Season series: www.vice.com/en_au/topic/its-high-season
