Mr Blonde
Bluelighter
Drugs: it's time to talk
May 19, 2012
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Bust ... police with marijuana plants in Melbourne last month. Photo: Jason South
The war on drugs has raged for decades with organised crime the only winner. Catherine Armitage reports.
Retired Salvation Army officer Brian Watters was startled to see Mick Palmer's name on the recent Australia21 think tank report which declared the war on drugs a failure and called for a national debate on ending drug prohibition.
When Major Watters was made prime minister John Howard's key adviser on combating illicit drugs, Palmer, then Australian Federal Police commissioner, was his deputy.
Heading the Australian National Council on Drugs from 1998, the two men fought side by side to implement Howard's ''tough on drugs'' policy. Palmer, then part way through what was to be a seven-year stint as head of the AFP, was responsible for implementing many of its beefed-up law enforcement measures.
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Still hardline ... Major Brian Watters backs the tough approach. Photo: Lee Besford
"He was just as strongly supportive of the [tough on drugs] approach as myself," said Watters this week. "If he went down the line with the stuff that was put out by Australia21, I would be be very, very surprised."
The Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, might also have been surprised to learn her freshly minted Foreign Minister, Bob Carr, lent his name to the report. There were raised eyebrows at Michael Wooldridge's presence, too - as health minister in the Howard government he was responsible for implementing much of the tough on drugs policy.
Palmer is taking no backward steps from the controversial report. His experience in law enforcement, and a drug-related family tragedy, have caused him to rethink his views.
"It is really time for a conversation,'' he said this week. ''To pretend this country's [drug prohibition] system is working, that it's really as good as we can expect of ourselves, is nonsense."
Palmer says he has concluded over time that no matter how effective police investigations are, no matter how many criminals are apprehended, "the end result, and the more you look at it the more obvious it becomes, is we make no difference".
"For us to be satisfied at the government level and at the community level with the current state of play is for us to put our heads in the sand."
According to the opposition spokesman on health, Peter Dutton, it's a conversation the Labor ministers in the two key drug-related portfolios of Health (Tanya Plibersek) and the Attorney-General (Nicola Roxon) are anxious to avoid, lest they be exposed as being out of step with community opinion.
He "suspects" both Plibersek and Roxon are "ideologically much more closely aligned with those who advocate decriminalisation - but they realise they are out of step with the wider community".
"I think if the lie detector were attached they would struggle to give a straight answer on this topic,'' Dutton said.
In response to the Australia21 report, Gillard quickly declared herself ''not in favour of decriminalisation of any of our drug laws". Roxon told ABC Radio that the challenge in ''stopping'' illicit drugs did not mean deregulation and legalisation would be the right solution. Plibersek has so far been silent, directing inquiries to the Minister for Mental Health, Mark Butler.
In response to Herald questions this week, Butler said through a spokeswoman that ''far from having failed, Australia's long-term National Drug Strategy and our harm-minimisation approach has seen major successes in reducing the prevalence and harms from drug use''.
The strategy, which includes spending $646 million on harm-minimisation programs over the next four years, rested on the three pillars of demand reduction, supply reduction and harm reduction, the spokeswoman said. On whether a national debate or summit was needed, she said the government would continue to engage with public health, law enforcement and other experts on the issue. Law enforcement would ''remain focused on the supply and distribution rather than use of illicit substances'', consistent with the harm minimisation approach.
The Australia21 report might yet turn out to be a turning point in the Australian debate on illicit drugs, not because it persuades the majority towards a path of decriminalisation but because it exposes more starkly than ever a divergence between expert and public opinion on the issue of how to tackle drugs.
Dutton is critical of what he sees as the Australia21 report's inference that supporters of decriminalisation are more experienced, more scientific and more caring than opponents. He pledges to conduct an urgent review of drug treatment programs within the health portfolio if the Coalition is elected to government. "I commit to doing that because we should make sure that money is being spent effectively and we should make sure that our priorities reflect the community's views."
He does not believe law enforcement is performing as well as it could in apprehending drug criminals, partly because the federal police are distracted by the "huge surge" in people smuggling. "The core business for all law enforcement should be to stamp as hard as possible on those at the top of the tree in terms of distribution and manufacture", says Dutton, a policeman in Queensland for 10 years before entering Parliament.
A Coalition government would take a more holistic approach to the fight against drugs. Dutton would like to see social welfare agencies more involved, for example, in quarantining welfare payments to drug addicts. "I would advocate that we look at everything that is available to us, including suspension of welfare payments, including the way in which we fund existing programs both in terms of the health portfolio and enforcement as well".
He is "absolutely confident" his view - anti-decriminalisation, rock hard on the drugs trade, empathy and treatment for addicts and users, education for prevention - "aligns with the majority of Australians".
Among those closely involved in the drugs issue contacted by the Herald this week there was consensus that the problem was worsening and policy settings needed revisiting. Several called for a national drugs summit, among them Gino Vumbaca, for the past 10 years executive director of the Australian National Council on Drugs. The office is a direct conduit of policy advice to the Prime Minister's office. He was appointed by Watters.
Illicit drugs began making headlines as a public policy issue in 1953 when the federal government prohibited the importation of heroin, previously in widespread medical use for pain relief, fighting off opposition from the states and howls of protest from the medical profession. Fast forward to 1985 when the then prime minister Bob Hawke, then with a heroin-addicted daughter, called the states to a drug summit.
According to Ian Webster, physician, emeritus professor of community medicine and public health at the University of NSW and often described as the grandfather of Australia's harm-reduction strategy, this was perhaps the first time Australian heads of government came together to discuss a social issue. It also led to harm reduction (as opposed to law enforcement alone) becoming set in stone as a pillar of the drugs policy.
Experimentation in harm reduction policies continued through the next decade. Illicit drugs, especially heroin, were never far from the headlines, and heroin deaths soared. In July 1997, Howard, the then prime minister, intervened personally to stop a scientific trial of prescription heroin on the grounds it would "send the wrong message", despite a 6:3 majority support of the Ministerial Council on Drug Strategy for the trial. In the wake of the ensuing controversy he launched the $500 million Tough on Drugs strategy, with more than $200 million going to drug law enforcement and an approximately equal amount to states and territories to encourage diversion of drug users from the criminal justice system to drug treatment programs.
Harm reduction strategies were also front and centre at the NSW Drugs Summit which Carr, then the premier, called in 1999. It set the scene for Australia's first and still only medically supervised injection centre in Sydney's King's Cross.
Through the warring rhetoric which has characterised the drugs debate, Australia has emerged with a "world-leading" and "in many respects very effective" national drugs policy incorporating harm reduction, according to David Templeman, chief executive of the Alcohol and Other Drugs Council of Australia, the peak body representing non-government organisations working to reduce drug harm.
He says the program that provides clean needles to injecting drug users, the medically supervised injection centre and the information campaign on the risks of cannabis use are all world leading policies.
But Vumbaca of the Australian National Council on Drugs is concerned the focus on illicit drugs has lessened in recent years. "Services are struggling, demand is rising, costs are rising but funding is staying the same," he says.
If policy is standing still, the drug trade is not. Laboratories creating new synthetic compounds for sale are working overtime, with a European Union report Vumbaca cites identifying 49 previously unseen compounds, mainly synthetic cannabis. The internet, meanwhile, has emerged as an important drugs market place, with the number of websites promoting "legal highs" doubling last year to about 700.
Perceptions of a resurgence in drug crime and use were reinforced by an Australian Crime Commission report this week indicating the number of cannabis seizures and arrests were the highest in a decade, as were the number and weight of amphetamine-type detections at Australia's borders. The weight of heroin seizures, at 357.7 kilograms in 2010-11, was the highest recorded since 2002-03.
Proponents of a policy shift towards decriminalisation argue that growing global drug use, a continuing high death toll and high levels of crime associated with drug supply and use despite the billions of dollars spent on law enforcement, show that current policy approaches are failing. They argue that drug prevention and treatment programs are better value than law enforcement programs.
One influential 2006 US study by the RAND Drug Policy Research Centre found that $US1 million applied to mandatory minimum sentencing for cocaine use would reduce its consumption by 13 kilograms; the same money applied to drug treatment would reduce cocaine consumption by 103 kilograms.
The experience of Portugal, which in 2001 decriminalised possession of personal-use quantities of all drugs, is cited as evidence that positive health and social effects can flow from relaxation of prohibition.
But opponents of decriminalisation, including Don Weatherburn, the director of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, argue the evidence is not clear-cut. There are cases where decriminalisation has resulted in an increase in cannabis use, such as the Netherlands. In South Australia a study found no significant increase in the rate of cannabis use after 1987 when arrest and prosecution for possession of small amounts were replaced by fines and infringement notices.
But the rate of lifetime cannabis use increased, Weatherburn points out, and the relatively small sample sizes used severely constrained the study's capacity to detect changes in weekly use. Studies on cannabis also give little indication of the likely impact of decriminalising more dangerous or addictive drugs such as heroin, amphetamines or cocaine.
Watters, the former head of the the Australian National Council on Drugs, is bitter that proponents of less severe penalties attribute the drop in heroin deaths in Australia in the late 1990s - from more than 1100 to about 400 a year now - to reduced production in supplier countries rather than the "tough on drugs" approach. Australia21 concluded the available data did not settle the question of which was responsible.
The polarising, black or white language of the debate - ''war on drugs'', ''tough on drugs'', ''soft on drugs'' - obscures the complexity of policy options. These range from prohibition (all behaviour related to drugs is a criminal offence) through decriminalisation (specified behaviour is dealt with under civil law) and depenalisation (reducing the severity of penalties) to legalisation (specified forms of behaviour are no longer offences under the law) and regulation (a controlled legal market such as occurs with tobacco, alcohol and pharmaceutical drugs).
Support for the latter option in relation to highly addictive drugs is close to zero. Most individuals have a more nuanced view. For example Ingrid van Beek, a doctor and the founding medical director of the Medically Supervised Injecting Centre at Kings Cross for its first eight years until 2008, has reservations about the "somewhat sweeping" anti-prohibitionist view adopted by the Australia21 group.
She has particular concerns about any lifting of prohibitions which would make highly addictive drugs with high mortality rates such as heroin and cocaine more available or cheap. "I think that would lead to higher levels of addiction in our community," she said. "It would worry me if heroin was to become reasonably available to people through anything beyond a well-controlled heroin prescription treatment".
Wooldridge, the one-time federal health minister, says the drugs issue is tough for governments because there is no clear-cut consensus, and because it taps into people's fears. He says there has been a big shift in the drugs debate. In the past it has been incumbent on those proposing change to make the case for it, but increasingly the onus has switched to those who defend the status quo to argue the case for it. He also believes support for change is "starting to cross the political divide".
Former AFP commissioner Palmer captures in appealing vernacular a commonly held view in the debate: "I don't have a golden bloody bullet here. I don't have any wonderful answers. I just know we need to have a better conversation about this."
Online community gets ahead of the curve
Today the Herald introduces WikiCurve - an interactive online tool to explore the community's views on an issue by looking at how past events affect current thinking.
When you go to the WikiCurve you will see a timeline of key events that influenced attitudes to drug laws.
You will be able to do four things:
add a comment.
rate the importance of the events in the evolution of community attitudes.
update the details of the event.
add a new event.
The curve will emerge as more people rate which of six stages each event fits into - discovery, theory development, popular interest, public debate, policy and regulation, and mainstream acceptance.
To have your say, go to smh.com.au and follow the link to WikiCurve.
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