Desmond Manderson’s High Time – How Australia changed its mind about illegal drugs, is a social history of Australia’s drug policy and a must-read for policymakers.

The great Canberra Times cartoonist Geoff Pryor depicted Prime Minister John Howard during his “Tough on Drugs” zero-tolerance crusade as Howard might have been at university. Other students are lazing around the dorm, long hair in bandanas, tie-dye clothes everywhere and an obvious purple haze hovering, as Howard, in school uniform, enters, all round eyes and awkwardness.

“Hey John, wanna joint?” offers one of the friendly long-hairs. “Oh, yes please,” replies the preppy Howard. “Lamb’s my favourite!”

Pryor was too kind. When it came to drugs, Howard wasn’t merely gormless: he was gutless, a roadblock on Australia’s gradual awakening from a blinkered law-enforcement-only regime to an acceptance of harm minimisation as the better approach to drug misuse.

There was no lack of science before Howard, as noted in Desmond Manderson’s new book, High Time – How Australia changed its mind about illegal drugs, a compendium of inarguable evidence, brightly presented.

The historical sweep of this book is impressive: from 19th-century Aboriginal girls being the victims of Chinese opium-pushing men to federal Labor’s lifesaving move in July 2022 (shortly after its election victory) to expand access to take-home naloxone (the overdose-reversing drug), without cost and without prescription.

High Time outlines the past 40 years of “dramatic” change in drug policy “as well as the efforts, halting and provisional to be sure, to undo some of the damage a century of drug prohibition has caused”.

Manderson does this with evidence.........

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