Paul Thomas: West's dilemma on drugs

The West's hypocrisy and confusion over recreational drugs are back on display.

A motley crew of young Australians has been arrested in Indonesia on drugs trafficking charges. If convicted, some of them face the death penalty.

Had they been nabbed in possession of 11.25kg of heroin in Sydney or Auckland, they wouldn't have got a scrap of sympathy. If and when found guilty, they'd be denounced in the most florid terminology the bench and the headline writers guild could summon - parasites, vampires, merchants of death - and no matter how much jail time they copped, it wouldn't be enough for some people.

The parents of drug casualties would be wheeled out to reflect on this plague decimating the flower of our youth and somewhere a fire-breathing talkback host would snarl "hanging's too good for them".

But despite the blood-lust of the Bring Back the Noose brigade, we don't hang people any more and we don't want anyone else to.

Not everyone shares our enlightened views. According to Amnesty International, a delegate to the 2004 National People's Congress admitted that China, the custodian of the Olympic spirit for the next few years, executes nearly 10,000 people a year. Indonesia retains the death penalty for various crimes, including rendering the president unfit to govern and, of course, producing and trafficking narcotics.

The Indonesians believe that executing drug criminals acts as a deterrent. Former president Megawati Sukarnoputri said last year, "Due to the great dangers of drug abuse that has threatened our younger generation, I will uphold capital punishment for drug-related crimes".

While in full agreement with the first part of this statement, the West recoils from the second. Rather than let the Indonesians get on with deterring drug smugglers their way, the Australian Government has already indicated it will pull out the diplomatic stops to prevent the death penalty being enacted.

The Indonesians' reward for doing what they believe, with good reason, the West expects them to do - crack down hard on the drugs trade - is to be abused if not demonised in the Australian media. Invidious comparisons are being drawn with Indonesia's apparent lack of zeal in the war on terror, and the racism and paranoia which always threaten to spill over when Australians fixate on their populous northern neighbour.

The Australian Federal Police are being hammered for tipping off their Indonesian counterparts rather than arresting the gang on its return to Australia, an act characterised by civil liberties groups as "exporting the death penalty". Meanwhile, in Bali, a media circus swirls around Australian beauty student Schapelle Corby, on trial after being arrested in possession of 4.1kg of marijuana.

Corby's plight has made her an instant celebrity amid suggestions that media stardom awaits her if she beats the charges. Most Australians seem convinced of her innocence for reasons ranging from her striking eyes to the unbelievable stupidity of the alleged crime.

I suspect the defence that no one could be that stupid is unlikely to cut any more ice in Bali than it does elsewhere. If there were no stupid crimes, our jails would be near empty and we wouldn't be steeling ourselves for the mandatory election-year law and order scare campaign.

The competence and integrity of the local authorities are also being questioned, as they always are when young Westerners find themselves behind bars a long way from home.

New Zealanders are getting used to questioning the competence of their police force and Australians some time ago had to face the fact that their various law-enforcement agencies were far from squeaky clean. In the words of the old Balinese proverb, people who live in glasshouses shouldn't throw stones.

The global narcotics trade exists and flourishes because of the voracious demand from Western consumers. Unable to suppress that demand, America declared war on drugs and the rest of the West joined up. However, this vast campaign on many fronts has failed to stem the tide but has succeeded in making drug trafficking the most lucrative activity under the sun.

Along the way, the war on drugs has driven countless essentially law-abiding citizens into the criminal milieu, strengthened and enriched organised crime the world over and corrupted the institutions of frontline states like Colombia and Mexico.

We've ended up with the worst of both worlds: de facto legalisation (when was the last time a user was busted for doing drugs in the privacy of their own home?), which stimulates demand, and legal prohibition, which effectively hands over a massively profitable industry to the worst elements in society.

Twenty years ago Auberon Waugh argued that hard drugs would never be legalised by a democratic government because parents would never vote to expose their children to potentially lethal substances.

We don't want our children to die of drug overdoses, nor do we want them mown down by foreign firing squads, even if one might prevent the other. If the Indonesians were to let the diplomatic mask slip for a minute, they'd probably tell us we're trying to have it both ways.

Of course we are. But that's the thing about drugs: they make it difficult to think straight.