| Exhibitions Reviews | Health and History, 9.2

Exhibitions Reviews

Does Prohibition of Drugs do more Harm than Good?

Drugs: A Social History. A travelling exhibition from the Justice and Police Museum, Sydney, touring 2005–2007. Hosted by the Museum of the Riverina, Baylis Street, Wagga Wagga, NSW, 5 September to 25 November 2007.

Museum web-site: http://www.wagga.nsw.gov.au/museum.

For other venues see Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales: http://www.hht.net.au/whats_on/exhibitions/travelling_exhibitions.

Seen at the Museum of the Riverina, 19 September 2007.

In Wagga Wagga Drugs: A Social History is being exhibited at the Historic Council Chambers site, next door to the present day City Council offices, library and regional art gallery. The exhibition aims to 'peel back the glossy layers to reveal the less glamorous aspects of drug taking, its risks and dangers,' and to inform debate about where drug policies have come from and where they should be heading. It includes a history of the use and prohibition of opium, heroin, cannabis, cocaine, hashish, amphetamines and ecstasy, as well as case studies of public awareness campaigns highlighting the harm caused by tobacco and alcohol—most notably the graffiti treatment given to billboard advertising of these products (the BUGAUP campaign) in the 1980s. In doing so the exhibition highlights a double standard in the way society and the justice system treat consumers of illicit and licit drugs, and reveals the values and vested interests that inform our tolerance of these differences.

Perhaps because of my own background as a consumer advocate working with older people around the quality use of medicines in the 1990s, I was disappointed that the exhibition largely ignores the clear evidence of harm due to modern prescribing practices, both in the overall population and for older people especially. This is documented, for example, in a recent Australian study led by Associate Professor Elizabeth Roughead of the Sansom Institute, University of South Australia, which estimated that between 85,000 and 110,000 Australians over 65 are admitted to hospital each year because of adverse reactions to prescribed drugs.¹ The same study showed that particular medications increase the risk of people requiring hospital treatment and that many of the admissions are preventable. Benzodiazepines (sleeping tablets) are among the culprits. Another study of 4,000 elderly Australians found that 20% of women aged 65 and over had been prescribed benzodiazepines despite their limited therapeutic value.²

Image 1: Cigares de Joy. Advertisement from Illustrated Australian News, 1881. Cannabis cigarettes for the relief of lung complaints were advertised as 'perfectly harmless ... for ladies, children and the most delicate patients ... contain[ing] no substance capable of deranging the system.' (Image courtesy of National Library of Australia.)

Our consumption of drugs of all kinds—medications, tobacco, alcohol and prohibited substances—serves a plethora of needs ranging from recreation and social interaction to maintaining health and is driven by various powerful interest groups. Pharmaceutical companies, doctors, pharmacists, big business, organised crime and governments dependent on taxes all play a part. In this context it is interesting to note that many prohibited substances were valued as medications before being redefined as 'drugs.'

As well as revealing how various players have contributed to the status quo, the exhibition captures, and to some extent interrogates, the social impacts of prohibition. In doing so it is to be congratulated for resisting the tendency to demonise drug users. This is one of the key strengths of the exhibition in my opinion. As co-curator, Inara Walden, notes in the excellent exhibition guide:

The choices we make about drug use are strongly bound up with identity and beliefs. The terms we use to describe each other—smoker or teetotaller, social drinker or soak, raver or junkie—are, like the drugs themselves, heavily loaded with connotations about values, lifestyle, even politics (p. 3).

In structure the exhibition is roughly chronological and the text, displays and videos are mostly contained in Perspex cubes that line the main room of the exhibition. The displays of apothecary jars, syringes, bongs and other drug related paraphernalia are no doubt a great drawcard. A second space, which covers the period from the sixties, also examines the way recreational use of illicit drugs is linked in the public imagination to youth rebellion and culture over generations, with the Nimbin Aquarius Festival in the 1970s as one example. Exhibits also include Beatles record covers and other psychedelic and flower power memorabilia from the 1960s and there is a colourful bean bag corner where visitors can watch a video about rave parties and a selection of young people's attitudes to drugs today.

The opium poppy plays an important role in the drugs story and the social history of opium sets the scene for the exhibition. The use of opium as a medicine dates back more than 2000 years and in Australia during the second half of the nineteenth century it was widely represented as a recreational drug used by Chinese people. Legislation to ban its importation for smoking after Federation appears to have been motivated more by anti-Chinese sentiment than by concerns about its addictive nature and health effects. In fact at the time patent medicines often contained alcohol and opium and these were sold for a range of ailments including infant teething, coughs and pain.

Image 2: 1887 trade card for Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup. Advertised for infants' teething problems, Mrs. Winslow's soothing syrup was just one of the many widely available 19th century patent medicines that were laced with alcohol and morphine or opium. (Barbara Hodgson/Byzantium Archives.)

Heroin was once widely used in Australia for women during childbirth and for cancer patients. In response to international pressure it was banned in 1953 despite protests from doctors at Melbourne's Royal Women's Hospital, who claimed that it was 'inhumane to ban such an effective pain relief drug.'

Using examples such as this, the exhibition asks whether drug addiction should be considered a social, medical or criminal problem. It also traces the use of drugs by creative artists—musicians, writers, poets, painters—and includes a profoundly moving self portrait by artist Brett Whitely titled 'Art, Life and the Other Thing.' The 'other thing,' addiction, is portrayed as a baboon screaming with pain, tears streaming from its eyes, hands nailed down, as it tries to resist a syringe drifting menacingly above it.

Public drugs policy continues to evolve and since the mid- 1980s the focus has been on 'harm minimisation,' which has included a range of successful initiatives to reduce morbidity and mortality. Co-curator Paul Dillon from the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre (NDARC) recounts the history and rationale for harm minimisation policy in the exhibition guide:

Prior to [harm minimisation policy], the emphasis in Australia had been on reducing the supply of and demand for illicit drugs. The new strategy added a third component: to minimise the harm caused to individuals and the community by the use of drugs (p. 10).

Image 3: Bessie Love as a suicidal morphine addict in the film Human Wreckage, US 1923. Director and co-star Dorothy Davenport made the film after the morphine-related death of her own husband. (Image courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs.)

Sponsored by the Alcohol Education and Rehabilitation Foundation, Drugs: A Social History provides a reminder that the drug scene is constantly reinventing itself. As well as continuing high use of ecstasy among young people, there are also the increasing risks posed by home made or imported 'crystal meth' or 'ice' (methamphetamines). Consequently, the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, University of New South Wales, which supported the exhibition, has produced written resources and updated the section dealing with the production and supply of methamphetamine and its effects on health, including psychosis.

At Wagga Wagga the museum has also developed public information events in conjunction with the exhibition to tap into the interests of groups in the community. These relate to emerging issues such as increasing evidence of the complex links between drugs use, mental health, and incarceration. There has also been a forum for seniors on the quality use of medicines and what to do about side effects.

Drugs: A Social History challenges visitors to reconsider their own views about drugs, ponder whether the social effects of prohibition are too high a price to pay, and question how effective prohibition actually is. For example, the exhibition describes the approach to cannabis use in the Netherlands, where cafes have been allowed to sell cannabis openly since the 1970s. Experience there has shown that few cannabis users touch heroin and, furthermore, 'statistics indicate that cannabis use is no more prevalent among Dutch youth today than it is in Australia, where it remains illegal' [my emphasis].

Is it time we looked at addiction as a mental health issue rather than a crime? And if we did, what difference would it make? Does stigmatisation cause greater harm than drug use per se? And to what extent is drug use linked to the social gradient and social determinants of health such as social exclusion, poverty and failure in the education system?

While these issues are not examined in detail, they are part of the subtext of the exhibition and it was heartening to see it attracting younger people—because it is they who will drive informed debate about the real human and social costs of existing drug laws and drug use in the future.

ANNEE LAWRENCE

INDEPENDENT AUTHOR

Notes

^1. E.E. Roughead, B. Anderson, and A.L. Gilbert, "Potentially Inappropriate Prescribing among Australian Veterans and War Widows/widowers, Internal Medicine Journal vol. 37, no. 6 (2007), 402–405.

^2. Alice Windle, Elizabeth Elliot, Katherine Duszynski, and Vivienne Moore, "Benzodiazepine Prescribing in Elderly Australian General Practice Patients," Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health vol 31, no. 4 (2007), 379–381.

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