Book Review: From Mr. Sin to Mr. Big: A History of Australian Drug Laws

Abstract

From to Big: A History of Australian Drug Laws, by Desmond Manderson (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1993), 262 pp., illustrated, $28 U.S. (paper only). From to Big reminds one of a good opera-well sung, well written and orchestrated, full of deceit and misery, and a little depressing through most of it. I say depressing because Professor Manderson's history of Australian drug policy is almost certain to remind readers of similar follies in their own countries. But, unlike many operas, Manderson's book holds the promise of a happier, if not happy, ending-at least in Australia. Professor Manderson set out to write about the history of Australia's drug laws. This he did, and much more. This book is not only about the history of one country's drug laws. Students of drug policy in other countries will see familiar strains as they sift through the enormous amount of detail. Racism, political opportunism, international bullying, competing bureaucracies, and what one Canadian scholar refers to as the collective stupidity* of people confronting drug policy issues figure large in Professor Manderson's book. They are also familiar marks of drug policy developments in most Western countries. Only this book seems to leave readers with the sense that there may be a more satisfactory resolution in the offing-most unoperatic, and certainly most unlike the prospects of so many intellectually calcified countries. One of the tragedies of our era is that a scholar of Manderson's caliber must spend his considerable talents focusing on drug policy issues that intelligent societies should long ago have resolved. However, ours remains largely a real world where drug policies are dictated by political winds, money, vested interests, misplaced morality, and McCarthyist venom. Professor Manderson is therefore left to apply his insights to the war on drugs; other important social issues are clearly losers. From to Big, through its rigorous (sometimes overwhelmingly so) review of the origins and evolution of Australian drug policies, shows the astounding intellectual frailty underpinning modern drug policies. Professor Manderson's tale begins with the racist reaction to Chinese immigration in the late l9th century, expressed in part through vilification of opium. The book progresses through the internationalization of drug policy starting in the early 1900s, the turf wars between competing vested interests, the growth of the drugs bureaucracies, and the royal commissions, ending up squarely in the 1990s. Mr. Sin is not Professor Manderson's veiled reference to a religious undercurrent below the surface of prohibition. Rather, it is the name of the fictitious Chinese immigrant who, as his alleged counterparts did elsewhere in the world, wreaked havoc with the morals and fibre of Australian society. Hence arose, as Professor Manderson shows, the racist roots (sound familiar to those from other countries?) of Australian prohibitionist drug policies. As Australian society evolved, so did the villain. Sin, no longer the evil drug fiend fashionable as a target of prohibitionists, became Big, the evil businessman supposedly standing with his organized crime colleagues at the pinnacle of the drug trade in Australia. One of the most interesting pieces of analysis in the book is also one that can be easily applied to drug policies in other countries. Manderson describes modern laws on illegal drugs as (pp. 158-159). Meta-law, he explains, is law about laws, not law about things. A meta-law does not alter what people may or may not do. Instead, it aims at enforcing laws already in place. For example, laws that expand police powers in drug investigations simply make law enforcement easier. The drug laws of recent decades are meta-law. They are laws built on prohibitionist law to facilitate the enforcement of the prohibitionist law. And, conveniently for prohibitionists, meta-laws do not direct attention to the flawed underlying assumptions of the core prohibitionist law. …