Founders & Patrons

Australian medical researcher, ethical and social policy pioneer, Dr Joseph Santamaria OAM was born in the Aeolian Islands, just north of Sicily in 1923. He grew up with six siblings, within a migrant family in Brunswick, one of Melbourne’s inner suburbs. Dr Joe’s eldest brother was well known across Australia – the late B.A. or ‘Bob’ Santamaria. Studying medicine during the Second World War, Dr Joe graduated in 1948 and specialised in Internal Medicine and Haematology. For a time he worked in General Practice. His social and ethical insights were also deepening throughout the 1960s, as his work in Melbourne, included research into the effects of alcohol dependency and drug abuse among many patients, some homeless, who frequented the streets around St Vincent’s Hospital, in Fitzroy. In 1970, he became the Director of the Centre of Community Medicine at St Vincent’s Hospital. This centre provided both outreach and research into the social, psychological and medical impacts of drug and alcohol use and abuse. As a consultant physician and the Foundation Chairman of the Addiction Research Institute, Dr Joe worked in the field of Alcohol and Drug Addiction for over 30 years. With his vast experience in the negative effects of drugs and treatment for drug addiction, Dr Joe became the Founding Chair of the Drug Advisory Council of Australia (DACA). DACA was set up in 1980 to promote sound public policy and education on the dangers of illicit drugs to individuals, families and the wider community. With profound medical knowledge and professional expertise Dr Joe’s sincere aim was to reduce the harms. Vale Dr Joe passed away on 30 June 2019.

Mrs Walters has adopted a meticulous approach to her research of drug use and control around the world. The result is her latest book The Cruel Hoax, an expanded version of her previous books, Marijuana – An Australian Crisis and The Cannabis Connection.

Mrs Walters said she first became interested in drug issues while listening to a talk-back radio program 15 years ago. The parents of drug-addicted children were calling in.

I felt really moved. I thought its’ a pity they can’t get together. So I phoned the station and asked these people to contact me and invite them to share their experiences with each other.

They were the loveliest people. Often people have a strange perception about the parents of drug-addicted children. They feel that they must be dysfunctional families, or there’s something wrong with the parents to have let the children get into trouble like that.  But they were all really lovely people and broken-hearted about their children’s problems.

Mrs Walters said of the six or so who turned up to her support group, two were mothers of marijuana-addicted sons. On comparing notes, the mothers found that both boys had experienced the same problems.

The parents believed, as I believed, and some people still believe, it was a soft drug and not to worry too much.  But as the years went by they saw their boys’ deterioration, physically and mentally. They started to have mood swings and memory loss; they lost interest in hygiene.

Both boys had left school and got good jobs, and then they lost their jobs and their girlfriends and their whole social life disintegrated. Everything collapsed around them.

Mrs Walters said she was at first sceptical about the women’s claim that marijuana was the major cause of their sons’ problems. But as the support group Relatives Against the Intake of Narcotics, or RAIN grew, and she met more parents of marijuana-addicted children she became convinced that the drug was more dangerous than commonly believed.

After a few years of involvement with the group, she decided to investigate the issue further by talking to “the experts” – doctors, health administrators, social workers and drug counsellors.

After vast and meticulous research the dangers of marijuana use were exposed and expressed in Mrs Walters’ books.

Vale

Elaine Walters OAM passed away in May 2024