The NSW Users & AIDS Association

It’s December 2017. Sydney’s party season is in full swing. People are lining up outside Trance, the world’s first nightclub providing ecstasy instead of alcohol. It’s still officially a trial, but it’s been so successful that most pundits expect high-quality MDMA to be made permanently available.

No one in 2010 would have dreamed that ecstasy would be made legally available in under a decade, but then people still thought Sydney’s binge drinking crisis, worsening almost by the week, could be brought under control. Everything was tried over the next five years: early closures, advertising campaigns, new drunk and disorderly fines, severe restrictions on alcohol advertising. But nothing had worked: teenagers simply mimicked the furious drinking culture fostered so eagerly by the rest of the population.

Ethan Nadelmann, Executive Director of the New York-based Drug Policy Alliance and America's most important advocate for drug policy reform, visited NUAA in late November.

User's News editor Gideon Warhaft spoke to him about where drug reform is at, both in the United States and around the world. Gideon began by asking Ethan if advocating for drug law reform was now a respectable position in the US.

You never really wake up on Christmas morning; you come to with a start. I've always preferred to ignore Christmas, or maybe the year always winds up with Christmas ignoring me. Who bitch-slapped who first makes no difference.

I've done all the Christmases in my day. Sat it out with the olds in the suburbs in Jughead's paper hat, whipped up a roast with a few besties in a share-house, even held my own bubs up to the camera 'til they grew wings and took off to start avoiding Christmas on their own. I used to hang around like the dregs in a schooner glass, flat and bitter, but once time stretches out a bit, well, it's a nice quiet day and you've only yourself to please. 'Tis the season to be jolly? Well, okay then.