Drug trade's tragic toll and institutional ignorance revealed
Article from: The Courier-Mail
Matthew Fynes-Clinton
April 03, 2009 11:00pm
FIVE community pillars have let down our youth with a not-in-my-backyard attitude to the flourishing illicit drug problem.
The institutions of ignorance are schools, the police and criminal justice system, the health and drug treatment sector, law makers and the pubs and clubs industry.
This conclusion owes nothing to statistics or voices from official corners.
It is centred on the observations of dozens of ordinary Queenslanders spoken to by The Courier-Mail in the course of its wide-ranging investigation into the growth of amphetamine-type stimulant drugs.
Our stories - your stories - over the past week, highlighting abuse of drugs such as ecstasy, ice and speed, have picked up a wake of carnage.
But now, at whose feet do we drop it?
After a Brisbane mother had caught her 14-year-old son smoking marijuana with other students before school, on the perimeter of the grounds, she learned that he'd been regularly attending sick bay in the mornings. "I saw the haemorrhaging eyeballs," she said. "He was so bleary, he could hardly talk.
"But the school nurse had been diagnosing conjunctivitis ... If I'd been told earlier, I would have been able to say to them, 'Well, he didn't have conjunctivitis at 8 o'clock, how did he get conjunctivitis by half-past 8?'
"How could his teachers not recognise there was something seriously wrong here? How could the school nurse not recognise that this was drugs?"
The mother said she approached police about it, "but they said they had better things to do with their time than round up kids who were smoking dope before school." She said she found some teachers at the government-run school who were prepared to admit "unofficially" they knew kids were turning up stoned.
"But what they told me is that unless a kid is caught red-handed, on the premises, they don't want to know about it."
The woman's son is now 26, a schizophrenic and a speed addict, who has tried to kill himself at least twice.
Meantime, Ron Eddington, a retired Queensland police inspector who spent 38 years as a detective, said drug dealers were often not arrested, but charged by written notice - because it saved police time.
This left offenders loose to continue their operations for months.
"Not so long ago, I was involved in a matter at a house, and I found three notices-to-attend in relation to drug matters," he said.
"They related to three consecutive days where the offender had been apprehended selling heroin, amphetamines and three or four other drugs.
"And he was given a month's notice to appear before the Magistrate's Court, and then after that he'd (likely) get an adjournment for a couple of months."
Mr Eddington said alleged drug pushers should be put straight into custody.
"Forget all this bulls--- about notices-to-attend, they should be arrested that night," he said. "They should be held inthe watchhouse until they appearbefore the magistrate the next morning.
"And then, if they were a persistent offender ... they wouldn't get bail."
Another Brisbane mother, who was assaulted by her adult daughter in what she suspects was speed-fuelled rage, recalled travelling immediately to the local police station. "This officer was just sitting there with his legs up and his KFC," she said.
"I was bleeding and I said to him, 'I've just been assaulted'. He said to me, 'Oh, anyone see it, love?' I said no and he said, 'Well, you've got no witnesses, go home and make yourself a strong cup of coffee. Because it's never going to get to court."
People from all walks - lawyers, doctors, academics and a spectrum of families - spoke of the stonewalling at hospital counters and drug rehabilitation centres. "I tried to get my son in rehab," said one frustrated mother. "But at the end of the day, they say that if the person is not voluntarily presenting, there is nothing they can do."
"We need to make treatment more accessible, easier to get into and easier to come back into (after relapse)," said Dr Mark Daglish, Royal Brisbane Hospital director of addiction psychiatry.
A Gold Coast barrister related that even when addicts mustered their first restorative step – usually a trip to the public hospital – too often they "fell through the cracks".
"They've finally been convinced by someone to go to hospital," he said.
"But when they present there, they're told that because they're not in the midst of a psychotic state and an immediate danger to themselves or somebody else, they're discharged.
"Two hours later, that person steals a car or robs the corner store."
The Courier-Mail series, which began on Monday, ventured from the caverns of nightclub drug-taking to dimmer corners, shaking out the stories of dealers.
The investigation traced the sourcing and making of illicit amphetamines, probed the enmeshment of outlaw motorcycle gangs, and examined the nexus between drugs and all crime.
The raw nerve of drug abuse was exposed through moving accounts from addicts and their torn relatives.
And the newspaper negotiated the release of government scientific tests that proved a parade of dangerous substances are masquerading as ecstasy.
It is ecstasy, of all amphetamines, that shapes as the timebomb. One in four Australians aged 20-29 has tried the drug – and numbers are escalating each year.
And yet, part-responsibility lies in an extraordinary piece of government somnolence.
A source from a commonwealth crime-fighting body revealed how pill presses – destined for ecstasy manufacture – were pouring into the country with no import controls.
He said intelligence agencies had identified the arrival of 149 of the Asian-made machines at Australian ports from 2004-2007. But with no Federal Government registration or licensing requirements, "all of those have just disappeared into the community".
Home Affairs Minister Bob Debus had two things to say. Yes, the presses are not prohibited imports. And no review of the policy is imminent.
Back in the bustling late-night entertainment precincts within Brisbane and the Gold Coast, the newspaper conducted 10 police-accredited drug swipe tests on clubs and pubs.
Only two of the venues were drug-free. The others returned positive readings to one or more of: amphetamine/methamphetamine/ecstasy; cocaine, cannabis and opiates.
On the record, club proprietors acknowledge drugs are consumed at their premises.
But they are perceptibly hands-off, speaking in terms of a practice they "don't condone".
They stand ready, they say, to liaise with police to help stamp it out.
However, privately, they illuminate their distinct lack of pro-activity.
They say it is not their job to enforce drug laws. And that everyone has the right to close a toilet cubicle door; as if, with a turn of a latch, one who chops and snorts is exempt from the consequences of illegal activity.
The aforementioned barrister practically shrieked at the magnitude of day-to-day myopia on drugs.
"If we had one person dying a week in Queensland from typhoid or avian bird flu, or a plane crash, or being run over by a bus, there'd be a parliamentary inquiry," he said.
"Well, every day there are people dying directly or indirectly due to their addiction to amphetamines. But it's just passing by the wayside.
"Meanwhile, there's a growth industry in jails . . . there's a growth industry in cemeteries and crematoriums."
Courier-Mail