Coalition at odds over 'ice' problem
Annabel Stafford, Canberra
February 8, 2007
GOVERNMENT backbenchers have crossed swords over how to deal with growing problems associated with the drug ice after its expert advisers urged an approach of minimising harm to users.
In a closed Coalition meeting this week, Nationals Whip Kay Hull attacked a report released by the Australian National Council on Drugs, which called for harm minimisation measures such as guidelines on how to treat mental illnesses associated with drug use and education for users on avoiding sexually transmitted diseases. Ms Hull was backed by Liberal MP Alby Schultz who — The Age believes — lashed out at safe injecting rooms.
"I'm sick to death of this term 'harm minimisation'," Ms Hull told The Age.
"It just does not reflect our tough-on-drugs strategy at all and the harm-minimisation approach just encourages the maintenance of a drug habit. It gives people the view that it's OK to go on taking drugs."
When she was chairwoman of a parliamentary inquiry into substance abuse, which released the Road to Recovery report in 2003, ice was just becoming a problem, Ms Hull said.
"Now we have a significant proportion of users that are addicted. It's being made cheaply and nastily and we are still into harm minimisation rather than prevention," she said.
"The community as a whole is not interested in harm minimisation. They are more inclined to harm prevention eventually leading to abstinence."
Ms Hull, who "absolutely opposes safe injecting rooms" for drug users, was unapologetic about being "a tough-on-drugs person".
"Abstinence is not a four-letter word," she said. "I should be able to talk about abstinence as though it were possible and I shouldn't come under attack from those supportive of heroin-injecting rooms."
But Liberal MP Mal Washer — who is also a doctor — said arguments against harm minimisation were "total rubbish".
"Harm minimisation is an essential component of management of drugs in this country … Abstinence doesn't always work, so we have to engage people if they do start on drugs and try to get them off. In the meantime, we have to minimise the harm they do to themselves and other people."
Dr Washer went even further, saying that all states should be introducing harm-minimisation policies into their prisons, where the incidence of hepatitis C and B and HIV are growing.
While it was nice to talk as if there were no drug problems, that wasn't the reality , he said.
Drugs Council chairman John Herron, a former minister in the Howard Government, said that while "we're all tough on drugs and we would like to have no illicit drugs … we believe in treating people rather than punishing them".
