Has Paul Sheehan Written the Worst Article Ever?

We would all be better off without those
 pinko, poofter, druggy mongrels!

I have just read, what could be considered by some, the worse article ever written.

I knew something was adrift when the author, Paul Sheehan started slamming the movie, Animal Kingdom. I thought this would be his kind of movie, you know with cops killing crims, and all but it seems, Sheehan loves The King’s Speech instead. Another magnificent film, all the same.

We all know Sheehan is anti-labor and a raving right-wing apologist and his article was written as expected. But it was his attack on the Kings Cross Medically Supervised Injecting Centre (MSIC) that left me cold. Sheehan, like most crazy ultra conservatives hates junkies. According to him, they are the “most reckless and self-indulgent people in society” and MSIC just allows them to “experiment” with high doses of heroin because MSIC staff will revive them if they overdose.

If you feel like you’ve heard this before, you are right. Anti-drug superhero and Drug Free Australia (DFA) secretary, Gary Christian has spent over four years pushing this theory and even produced a paper on the subject titled A Case for Closure. Sadly for Gary, only nuttters like Sheehan take it seriously while actual experts and professionals simply ignore it. It’s also interesting to note that Sheehan’s detailed research couldn’t even produce the correct spelling for Gary Christian’s name.

Not surprisingly, Gary Christian couldn’t subdue his excitement and posted a quote from the article to the the ADCA email forum. And equally not surprising, his post was instantly rejected by some respected ADCA email forum subscribers. In case you didn’t know, the ADCA email forum is the official bulletin board for AOD professionals, hosted by The Alcohol and other Drugs Council of Australia(ADCA).

Start by telling the truth not lying. The funds for the MSIC do NOT come from the public - they come from proceeds of crime.

Sheehan's article fed by Christian is the worst piece of mistruth and claptrap I have ever seen. He manages to out-do Ackerman, Bolt and Devine.

That is saying something.

I support the injecting room - so do the majority of the family members that I talk to.

--Tony Trimingham: Chief Executive Officer of Family Drug Support / ANCD Member

Whether Sheehan was simply writing about his favourite subject, the Labor Party or spewing out his hate for drug addicts is unclear. Like Piers Akerman from the Daily Telegraph, Sheehan’s main focus is slamming the Labor Party, especially the NSW branch. And like Piers Akerhead, there is an assumption that colourful writing and repeating the same old criticism over and over will magically persuade the readers that they have a valid point.

In the Cross, the core of the rot is sponsored by the NSW government itself. It is the blandly named Medically Supervised Injecting Centre, conveniently located on Darlinghurst Road opposite the entrance to Kings Cross railway station. Never have so many lies been fed to the public in support of this policy quagmire.
--Paul Sheehan: A state's addiction to crime(Sydney Morning Herald)

What is clear though, is that Sheehan has swallowed the Drug Free Australia (DFA) bait … hook, line and sinker.

One of the leading figures behind Drug Free Australia, Gary Christiansen, told me: ''The number of overdoses in the [Kings Cross] facility have been a staggering 35 to 42 times higher than the rate of overdose experienced by clients [drug-users] before they registered to use the room. Testimony by former clients in the NSW Hansard indicates that the overdose numbers are so high because clients experiment with higher doses of heroin and poly-drug cocktails, using the safety of the room as a guarantee.''

--Paul Sheehan: A state's addiction to crime(Sydney Morning Herald)

I have no problem with people expressing their opinion but where do we draw the line? I suggest that popular media outlets should be forced to not publish material that blatantly deceives the audience. In other words, they can not lie, regardless of whether it’s an opinion piece or not. You would think that after Miranda Devine’s reign of terror on rational thinking, the Sydney Morning Herald would be keen to rid themselves of extreme, right wing rantings. Especially when a writer ignores the bulk of scientific evidence and instead relies on the rejected research and ramblings of an infamous anti-drug zealot.

The argument justifying the centre is that has cleaned up the drug trade and saved ''hundreds'' of lives. This is propaganda worthy of North Korea. The reality is the opposite. The centre is directly responsible for hundreds of drug overdoses. It has created an environment where the most reckless and self-indulgent people in society - junkies - know they will be bailed out of their own risks.

The result is stratospheric rates of drug overdoses and interventions, which are then counted as lives saved. This is the basis on which more than $25 million in public funding has been requested and justified by the drug-legalisation lobby. Anyone interested in the non-North Korean view of this social experiment can find a blistering, highly detailed counter-view on the website of Drug Free Australia.
--Paul Sheehan: A state's addiction to crime(Sydney Morning Herald)

North Korea? Social experiment? $25 million in public funding? Colourful … yes. Correct … no. As Tony Trimingham pointed out, MSIC is funded from proceeds of crime not by the tax payer. And why is saving hundreds of lives called propaganda? Instead of using the actual data collected by MSIC, Gary Christian starts with some highly contentious and indeterminable assumptions then multiplies them out over eight years to get an even more unreliable result. This is the basis for his argument - that statistically MSIC has only saved 4 lives - to challenge Australia’s leading researchers and experts. It’s been pointed out many times previously to Christian that multiplying uncertainties will just magnify any error and produce highly dubious results. What about those junkies who Sheehan describes as the “most reckless and self-indulgent people in society”? They’re not to be trusted in one paragraph but by the next, their testimony is suddenly worthy enough for Sheehan to include in his article. Hypocrisy at it’s best. But no right wing slur on harm minimisation is complete without the mandatory mention of being a “social experiment”. Yes, according to Sheehan, anything that doesn’t rely on tough law enforcement or considers the best interests of drug users, is a social experiment or even worse, morally wrong.

The association is merely part of a state-funded, ideologically driven lobby that seeks to legalise hard drugs, portray criminals as victims and deny the reality that the heroin subculture is fundamentally parasitic, cynical and self-absorbed

--Paul Sheehan: Life Is Cheap With Our Own Heroin Chic(Sydney Morning Herald)

Apart from despising drug users, Paul Sheehan also dislikes science and research when they don’t fit in with his ideology. He is probably not the best choice then when it comes to writing about scientific issues. You might remember not too long ago that Sheehan was proclaiming the wonders of a magical water source that cured rheumatoid arthritis and other major illnesses. He even provided an address to a warehouse where people could go and buy it. As it turns out, the mystical water was … well, just water. Add to the list, climate change denial, his claim that millions have lost their lives as a result of stopping the use of DDT and his rejection of evidence from drug experts, and you have someone who should steer clear of scientific and medical topics. Then again, this might explain why Sheehan was so drawn to Gary Christian and his reliance on junk science.

The idea that most intravenous drug users are prepared to suffer an overdose because someone is available to revive them, is ludicrous. This furphy was never even a consideration until Christian’s report. There may be a small group who take advantage of having qualified nurses on hand, armed with naloxone but they certainly don’t represent the average MSIC client. Even by Gary Christian’s standards, this leap in logic is absurd. How can only two users making the claim, out of thousands actually support the assumptions by Christian and Sheehan? Maybe someone should tell them that simply writing it in a report is not science and doesn’t make it true.

A State's Addiction To Crime

Sydney Morning Herald

Paul Sheehan

February 2011

One of the pleasures in public life today will be the Oscars, streamed live from Los Angeles at absurdly self-indulgent length. Local interest is provided by a strong Australian contingent for honours, including best picture (The King's Speech) co-produced in Australia, starring a brilliant Australian actor (Geoffrey Rush) playing an intimate to King George VI, with another brilliant Australian actor (Guy Pearce), playing another British monarch, King Edward VIII. Ironies abound.

The sentimental favourite among the Aussie nominees is Jacki Weaver, who plays a sweetly murderous grandmother in Animal Kingdom, a superbly crafted Australian drama (with Guy Pearce again) by first-time feature director David Michod. The film, which Michod also wrote, and Weaver in particular have received so many award nominations and critical acclaim that it is easy to overlook that the film has a hole in its heart.

The hole in the heart of Animal Kingdom is its script, where the drama is created by violence, not by depth or originality of the characters. It is same hole in the heart of Australian cinema generally, where the local production line of world-class actors, directors and cinematographers has never been matched by a comparable stream of world-class scripts.

This reflects the Australian film world, like the tax-subsidised Australian arts world in general, being a preachy monoculture that conforms to the safety of well-worn ruts. Animal Kingdom is no exception. The opening scene is a normal-looking suburban mother slumped on a couch. These are the first lines of dialogue:

Paramedic: ''What's she taken?''

Young man: ''Heroin.''

For the umpteenth time, an Australian film has trawled the criminal underclass for colour while portraying elements of the police as murderers with no honour code, unlike the crims they chase.

As it happens, I've been thinking a great deal about the way NSW has taken on some of the flavour of a police state. The context is the run-up to the state election. I'm wondering what the Coalition will do about the police after it wins office on March 26. In NSW, we have the worst of both worlds, where the cops and the government are tough on hundreds of thousands of non-criminals going about their daily lives, while giving a free pass to real criminals.

This dysfunction is exemplified in Kings Cross, where the NSW government is complicit in the heroin trade while, as a result of this complicity, the police have all but given up arresting junkies in the Cross.

Darlinghurst Road has become entrenched as a place where drug and alcohol abuse flourishes. Meanwhile, just down the hill, on busy New South Head Road, the police stop thousands of motorists who are causing no problems. At this checkpoint, the presumption is guilt, the selection process is random, and the probable cause is non-existent.

Checkpoints, random stops, speed cameras and speed traps. This is the real face of the NSW Police. The force has been turned into petty bureaucrats charged with gouging revenue from taxpayers, while looking the other way as the heroin traffic flourishes in plain sight. Our legal system and state bureaucracy have turned the thin blue line into a bleached corps of tax agents, social workers, stress-leave jockeys and second-job jugglers, leaving a few hard units to do hard investigations into hard crime.

Look at Kings Cross. It used to be one of Australia's most sophisticated, cosmopolitan and pleasant precincts. Now it is a bogan paradise, a cathedral to bad taste, a product of the power of the alcohol, heroin and poker machine industries that have enjoyed unprecedented power or tolerance for 16 years under the Labor patronage machine and pork factory.

In the Cross, the core of the rot is sponsored by the NSW government itself. It is the blandly named Medically Supervised Injecting Centre, conveniently located on Darlinghurst Road opposite the entrance to Kings Cross railway station. Never have so many lies been fed to the public in support of this policy quagmire.

The argument justifying the centre is that has cleaned up the drug trade and saved ''hundreds'' of lives. This is propaganda worthy of North Korea. The reality is the opposite. The centre is directly responsible for hundreds of drug overdoses. It has created an environment where the most reckless and self-indulgent people in society - junkies - know they will be bailed out of their own risks.

The result is stratospheric rates of drug overdoses and interventions, which are then counted as lives saved. This is the basis on which more than $25 million in public funding has been requested and justified by the drug-legalisation lobby. Anyone interested in the non-North Korean view of this social experiment can find a blistering, highly detailed counter-view on the website of Drug Free Australia (www.drugfree.org.au).

One of the leading figures behind Drug Free Australia, Gary Christiansen, told me: ''The number of overdoses in the [Kings Cross] facility have been a staggering 35 to 42 times higher than the rate of overdose experienced by clients [drug-users] before they registered to use the room. Testimony by former clients in the NSW Hansard indicates that the overdose numbers are so high because clients experiment with higher doses of heroin and poly-drug cocktails, using the safety of the room as a guarantee.''

As for the wider matter of dysfunctional policing, the opposition has announced that it finds the use of speed traps to be overbearing, deceptive and intrusive. Yesterday it announced it would review the entire process if elected to government. This is encouraging.

Another telling benchmark will come after March 26, when the new government decides what to do about the tax-funded heroin honeypot in the heart of Sydney.

Related Articles:

Mysteries Of The Magic Water Man

Life is cheap with our own heroin chic

The Original Story: Paul Sheehan on the effect of the water

Too good to be true - Paul Sheehan and the magic water debacle

Lawyer Marsden: Paul Sheehan’s vitriol

Paul Sheehan: Liar Or Stupid? "Islamophobia is a myth"

Questioning Christian Behaviour at Beyond 2008

Cannabis is a Hard Drug Too! - More DFA Deceit

How DFA Logic Exposed the Real Fifth Columnist

Who are Drug Free Australia (DFA)?