No easy answers
CAYAD worker Denis O’Reilly has spent a lot of time around either alcohol or drugs in one way or another. In this short life story, he muses on the confused nature of our attitudes towards legal and illicit drugs.
My dad, Dinny O’Reilly, was a kind and hardworking man who raised his six kids to be good and contributing citizens. We had a family business in Timaru, a service station that was open seven days a week. It was not only the focus of our family’s life, it also served as the fulcrum for an Irish Catholic community of neighbours and friends.
The link of the ‘Faith’ was one thing, but there were others too – a love of horseracing and a genetic predisposition towards alcohol in all its forms, but preferably good whisky. The tyre room, where dad repaired punctures and vulcanised tyres, was a de facto bar. The big tank where we tested tubes for leaks served as a useful beer chiller, and Dad’s friends and relatives would pop in and chat to him whilst he worked, and generally a beer or two would be consumed.
We’d always be well stocked with crates, and in the days of six o’clock closing, it would not be unknown for one of his mates to come down to the garage and grab a crate or two for replacement the next day. Dad would have bridled at the accusation of being a ‘sly grogger’, but I’m pretty sure that a licensing inspector may have come to that conclusion.
Timaru is a port town, and many ‘wharfies’ were amongst his customers and friends. Every now and then, there’d be conspiratorial discussion in the tyre room with one of the wharfies. The lube bay doors would be opened, a hulking Chevy would be driven in, and boxes of whisky would be unloaded.
Once, I can remember Dad, having consumed some of the ‘holy wather’ as he called it, putting bottles of whisky in a wheelbarrow and delivering orders to neighbours up and down the street. It was all done with a twinkle in the eye and the celebration of rebelliousness that is a mark of our race.
If you had accused him of being a ‘drug smuggler’, he would have roared with outrage. He hated drugs and all that they seemed to represent. When I was 18, I managed to score a little bit of hash. He found out, and the furore that followed made the current concern around the collapse of Wall St pale in comparison. I could have said Hail Marys forever and crawled around the Stones of Knock for the rest of my life and it would not have assuaged my guilt. If only it had been whisky!
Later in life, and living in Wellington, I moonlighted as a bouncer for some Greek nightclub owners. I had two children and a wife to care for, and my earnings were not enough to adequately care for their increasing needs.
Ten o’clock closing had just been introduced, and Jake the Muss stalked the streets. Large-scale drunken brawls were standard fare. Marijuana was starting to be used socially, and it didn’t take a degree in sociology to observe that some people were a lot nicer to deal with when they had been toking as opposed to drinking. In fact, when there was no dope around, we knew we were going to have a very heavy and violent night on the door.
Fast forward from the 1970s to the new millennium and the widespread use of methamphetamine. For the past five years, driven by the death of friends, I’ve worked really hard to build community resilience against this particular substance. In some quarters, there are now ‘P free’ zones where groups won’t tolerate the presence of methamphetamine.
A couple of weeks ago, there was a party amongst such a group. Because booze is legal, readily available, cheap, strong and so easily drinkable in the form of RTDs, it has again become the primary drug of choice.
The partygoers over imbibed, and a nasty fight broke out. People were injured, and property was damaged. Moreover, family turned against family, and it has taken a lot of körero to calm things down. In reviewing what had gone down, one of the peacemakers – a non-drinker – said to me, “Bro, this is getting like the 1970s again. I’m committed to our (no P) kaupapa but don’t you think we should just go back to smoking dope and lay off the booze?”
The received wisdom is that we take drugs for a variety of reasons: to cope, to self medicate, to forget our troubles and woes, to find structure, to give some theme and purpose to our lives, and for status – to be part of the scene.
At a societal level, we try to control drugs because of intoxication, addiction, impaired decision making, the potential to harm others and the need to look after ourselves.
The drivers to our drug taking are essentially psychological, which suggests we need health-based strategies to drive down demand. I don’t think there is much debate about that. But when it comes to controlling drugs – that is, reducing supply – we lose consensus.
There are powerful lobbies around the continued sale of legal drugs such as alcohol and tobacco. That’s because some people make lots of money out of them. Few people would argue about the harm done by consumption of alcohol and cigarettes but both are currently sold at corner dairies.
Despite the fact that 4,700 New Zealanders are said to die annually from smoking, a major political party has recently rejected the move to keep cigarettes out of sight on the basis that this would be an interference by ‘Nanny State’.
Yet, when it comes to those substances we deem illicit, regardless of any balanced scorecard assessing their respective harm impacts against alcohol and tobacco, we simply turn to prohibition, despite its proven ineffectiveness. The accelerating prison population reflects that fact.
Do illicit drugs cause harm? Absolutely. Do they cause worse harm than legal drugs? On balance, I’m not too sure. I don’t have any easy answers to the conundrum of legalisation or decriminalisation of particular substances. But I am my father’s son, and for some reason, my particular poison is legal and comes in a bottle.
Denis O’Reilly is a social activist, coach, businessman and a Community Action Youth and Drugs worker with Consultancy Advocacy and Research Trust and Mokai Whänau Ora.
