by Allen Douglas

The financial elites are using churchmen as stooges in their drive for legalization. Amid a blaze of nationwide publicity, Australia's first public facility where heroin addicts can inject themselves, was opened in Sydney on May 3. Called the "T-Room," or "Tolerance Room," the facility is located in the Uniting Church's Wayside Chapel in the notorious King's Cross red light district. Sponsored by a group of Protestant and Catholic clergy, in alliance with some of the nation's most fanatic drug-legalization advocates, the shooting gallery will initially open two hours a day, three days a week.

Its very premise violates a New South Wales state law which carries a maximum penalty of a $2,200 fine or two years in jail, for "aiding and abetting self-administration of a prohibited drug." However, the room's sponsors, including Wayside's Rev. Ray Richmond, have pronounced themselves ready to go to jail. Meanwhile, T-Room sponsor and pro-dope campaigner Tony Trimmingham has said that the effort is the "thin edge of a wedge," and that there will soon be T-Rooms all over.

On May 5, the New South Wales police made an "inspection tour" of the room, but they made no arrests and they announced that they did not intend to "create martyrs."

The T-Room represents a dramatic escalation of the drive to legalise drugs, a drive which has now garnered the support of the Australian Catholic Church and the major Protestant denominations, the latter of whom, combined over a decade ago to form the Uniting Church, which officially runs the T-Room. Father Steve Sinn of the Catholic Church of St. Canice is a sponsor of the room, while the official spokesman of the Australian Catholic Church, Father Brian Lucas, told the ABC on May 4 that "churches have a duty to challenge the state on important issues."

Wittingly or not, the churches are fronting for the real forces leading the drive for legalised heroin: Australia's major banks and private family foundations which finance the nation's main pro-legalisation lobby, the Australian Drug Foundation (ADF), which is pushing for injection rooms.

One of the ADF's key leaders is Dr. Ethan Nadelman, executive director of the Lindesmith Center in New York, the flagship institution of mega-speculator George Soros's worldwide drive to legalise drugs. Police estimate that at least $7 billion a year is laundered through Australia's financial institutions, which are anxious to see that amount expanded. Funders of the ADF include Australia's Reserve Bank; the "big four" commercial banks (National Australia Bank, Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, and ANZ); and several major family foundations grouped around the Queen's Trust, whose patron is Prince Charles. Raw materials giant Rio Tinto, in which the Queen has heavily invested, has also poured millions into the legalization campaign.

The media crusade for legalization has been led by press barons Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch, whose newspapers and TV stations have featured incessant coverage of the "exploding drug crisis," pictures of addicts injecting themselves in alleys, and so on. This campaign has prompted N.S.W. Premier Bob Carr, a former employee of Packer's, to call an unprecedented weeklong "Drug Summit" in Sydney beginning on May 17. About 135 state Members of Parliament and 80 representatives of community groups are expected to attend, and it will be chaired by Her Majesty's ranking Privy Councillor in Australia, former federal MP Ian Sinclair.

The T-Room was deliberately opened just before the drug summit, in order to make "legal injecting rooms" its main agenda item. While Carr has thus far opposed the rooms, his Director of Public Prosecutions, Nicholas Cowdery, is an outspoken supporter of them, and the head of the N.S.W. police force (the nation's largest), Peter Ryan, is also in favour. Ryan, a British cop who formerly conducted investigations for the British royal family, was brought in a few years ago to overhaul the N.S.W. police. He has sacked dozens of top officers, disbanded its highly effective anti-drug squad, and thoroughly demoralized the force, thus helping to create the present drug crisis.

To counter this lunacy, Lyndon LaRouche's associates in the Citizens Electoral Council (CEC) are circulating a dossier in their latest New Citizen newspaper, which exposes the banks and family funds pushing legalization, and counterposes to that, LaRouche's call for a real war on drugs. As LaRouche told an anti-drug conference in Mexico City in 1985, "The international drug-traffic has become an evil and powerful government in its own right. It represents today a financial, political, and military power greater than that of entire nations ... a government upon which we must declare war, a war which we must fight with the weapons of war, and a war which we must win in the same spirit the United States fought for the unconditional defeat of Nazism between 1941 and 1945."

Premier crusades for heroin

by Allen Douglas

While claiming to be 'repelled by heroin," New South Wales Premier Bob Carr is leading the charge to legalise it. At the close of the week-long state of New South Wales Drug Summit on May 21, the delegates, which included 135 state members of parliament and 89 community organisations, voted to drastically weaken the state's drug laws. They recommended that self-injecting heroin be legalised, that marijuana be decriminalised, and that heroin-injection rooms be set up.

Although N.S.W. Premier Bob Carr had pronounced himself firmly against such ideas, he and his senior government ministers in fact orchestrated the entire affair, including its recommendations—the most radical steps toward full-scale legalisation of drugs yet taken in Australia. Carr's hypocrisy did not go unnoticed. Said summit participant Maj. Brian Watters, the chairman of the Prime Minister's National Drug Policy Committee, "I'm quite sure that what happened ... was the result ... of a carefully orchestrated campaign over a number of weeks."

Liberal Party Member of Parliament Peter Debnam charged that the summit's "working groups," which drafted the resolutions, were run by the pro-dope lobby: "It was clear to me that the proposed resolutions of the working group were established from the beginning and nothing was going to substantially change them." Liberal MP Chris Hatcher charged that Carr had rigged everything: "And that's what this whole summit had been about—all carefully orchestrated by this government, all with the expert panel, so called; the experts all selected by the government, the agenda prepared by the [N.S.W.] public service."

Indeed, Carr's key ministers and law enforcement chiefs have all championed drug law "reform" and legalised heroin-injection rooms. These include: Director of Public Prosecutions Nicholas Cowdery; Attorney General Jeff Shaw; N.S.W. Justice James Wood, who led a three-year, $40 million Royal Commission attack on N.S.W.'s police force, and whose commission recommended legal injecting rooms; and N.S.W. police chief Peter Ryan, who dismantled the state's highly effective anti-drug squad in the wake of Wood's investigation. The summit and its recommendations were orchestrated from offstage by Carr's Special Minister of State, John Della Bosca.

Though a determined minority at the summit fought the pro-dopers, the most effective opposition came from Lyndon LaRouche's associates in the Citizens Electoral Council, who led a spirited demonstration against the rigged summit on its opening day, and who circulated their New Citizen newspaper featuring an exposé of the banks and private family funds crusading for legal dope. In its introduction to a full-page flow chart, "Australia's Pro-Dope Mafia," which named the names of the banks and individuals "above suspicion," the New Citizen charged: "Behind all the recent hysterical media coverage of the 'heroin crisis,' lies one simple fact: The powers-that-be in this country are on a mad drive to legalise heroin and other deadly drugs, in order to drastically expand drug consumption." Their purpose, the paper said, is to increase the billions of dollars flowing through their bankrupt financial institutions.

The fanatical pro-legalisation push is not unique to Australia, but is part of a Commonwealth-wide drive, in which Her Majesty's Canadian government plays a leading role, through its sponsorship of the Canadian Foundation for Latin American, which is pushing legalisation in Ibero-America, a leading drug-producing region. No wonder, then, that many Crown servants are prominent in the Australian legalisation push, including Her Majesty's senior Privy Councillor in Australia, Ian Sinclair, who chaired the summit, and N.S.W. police chief Peter Ryan, a British cop who carried out investigations for the royal family before being sent to N.S.W. several years ago. Furthermore, all the key Australian legalisers are closely associated with Her Majesty"s investment adviser, George Soros, the "Daddy Warbucks" of the worldwide legalisation drive.

The press barons of Her Majesty's British-American-Commonwealth media cartel, Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch, relentlessly campaigned for drug legalisation over the past several months, either directly, in the case of Packer, or by creating hysteria, in the case of Murdoch. Premier Carr on May 22 praised Packer's Sun-Herald for publishing a dramatic photograph of a young drug addict shooting up in a back lane, as the "spark which led directly to the summit," and which demonstrated that it was "something that had to be done."

Carr, whose sudden "change of heart" on dope surprised many, began his career as a scribe for Packer's pro-drug Bulletin magazine, where he was a member of Packer's inner circle. Packer was investigated for alleged drug running activities as the self-admitted "Goanna" in 1983 by the Costigan Royal Commission, which was shut down by Packer's friend, Labor Party Prime Minister Bob Hawke.