A bright Autumn day in Nimbin, a big blue sky embraces green mountains, paradise as a meeting of those two long time lovers, heaven and earth. People at peace, going about Earthly business under the bright blessing of God. And then the Drug War came to town.
Peacebus.com was called for, but my soul was seeped in morning sun, my heels dragging, my heart troubled. Another round of police folly. The erring wheel of ignorance never can be checked.
In the name of community safety, thirty armed officers had come with sniffer dog and search warrants and busted two cannabis cafes, closing them off, holding the customes and staff for search and questioning. Village people gathered around to bear witness, troubled, angry and powerless.
Imagine a Vietnamese peasant village of 30 years ago witnessing a patrol of righteous foreign mercenaries doing a search and destroy and you have some sense of it. The police have all the guns, their crisp clean uniforms contrast with the ragtag of the street poor.
In the hands of the police not guns but communications equipment. But their God given communications equipment of ears, heart and compassionate impulse is muted. The police listen to orders from a place and a people other than Nimbin. Lismore? Sydney? Washington? The boardroom of Eli Lilly, maker of Prozac, or some other far away, profiteering and uncaring multinational pharmaceutical corporation?
After the bust the police made their way up Cullen Street from the Oasis Café to the Police Station followed by a hissing and cat-calling crowd, like white blood corpuscles ejecting invader cells, their damage done.
Old timers like me rolled our eyes and remembered police Drug War operations in Nimbin past like the cattle truck raid on Tuntable in 1975, and the combined air/ground operation of El Dockin in 92. They come like summer storms; all sound a fury for a short while. Then they go and police are not to be found when we have street violence and real cause to act in the name of community safety.
We remembered the 1993 Woods Royal Commission into Police Corruption in NSW and how it had found the NSW Police Service to be endemically corrupt. The drug law enforcers were found to be the drug law criminals. That Royal Commission actually sat in Lismore to investigate the illicit drug trade that had made Ballina the entry point for white powder drugs into the Rainbow region.
Now the wheel had come full circle. Community policing is over. Drug War corruption is on the ascendant again and our police are not to be trusted. For it is not just the ther opportunities of plentiful loose cash of the illicit drug trade that corrupts, its lies, and denials and facing show raids corrupt too.
Truth has departed from police-community relations. Now the send us dunderheads and deceivers; yes men who are more concerned about their superannuation pay out than with honest dialogue in a collaboration to build community safety in Nimbin.
I do not know which planet these police officers think they live on but they will learn soon enough that the disease and despair of the Drug war will not be confined to the neighbourhoods of the poor.
It stalks their sons and daughters too.
Graeme Dunstan
Peacebus.com
17 May 2001
