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  • AADD Moderators: swilow | Vagabond696

NEWS: Sydney Morning Herald - 08/02/2007 'Parliament to hold drug inquiry'

would love to hear more about that, madmick - were there some affected families praising harm reduction or the other way round (or both!)?
 
There will be a hearing in Melbourne next Thursday... as per this link

PROGRAM
PUBLIC HEARING: MELBOURNE – THURSDAY, 3 MAY 2007
Room 2/3, Parliament House, 35 Spring St, Melbourne

9.00 am
TBA
09.45
Australian Institute of Family Studies
10.30
Morning tea
10.45
TBA
11.30
Centacare Catholic Family Services
12.15
Community statements
12.45
Lunch
1.30
TBA
2.15
Odyssey House Victoria
3.00
Afternoon tea
3.15
Focus on the Family Australia
4.00
Close

Under the community statements time, any member of the public is permitted to speak for up to five minutes on the subject of the inquiry. Bookings are not necessary and people can speak on a first name basis if they prefer not to disclose their identity on the Hansard record.
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NEWS: The Age - 10/05/07 ''Ice' cost to nation escalates'

'Ice' cost to nation escalates
Ben Doherty
May 10, 2007

EVERY kilogram of crystal methamphetamine, or ice, costs Australia $284,000.

This cost — covering crime and violence, the burden on police, ambulance and hospital services, and pressure on courts and prisons — has more than tripled in the past four years.

The Australian Federal Police has devised a drug harm index showing the economic impact of drugs in Australia.

Per kilogram, heroin is still the most harmful drug, costing the public $550,000 but this has nearly halved from $1,061,000 a kilogram since 2003.

Four years ago, one kilogram of amphetamine cost Australia an estimated $80,000 but that figure has jumped due to the massive increase in its use and destructiveness. Cannabis costs Australians about $13,000 a kilogram. Drug use costs the nation more than $6 billion a year.

Australians are among the heaviest users of ecstasy and ice in the world, despite comparatively high costs.

Appearing before a parliamentary committee examining the effects of illicit drug use on families, Australian Federal Police Assistant Commissioner Mike Phelan said: "(The Drug Harm Index figure for ice and other stimulant drugs) has increased because of the increased number of interactions with the health system, people having to go to hospital, and it's also the crime that goes with that — drug-taking, the burglaries, break-ins." Other factors, such as the cost of road accidents, lost work days and family break-ups are contributing to the spike in costs.

Ice, crystal methamphetamine hydrochloride, is known to cause aggression, anxiety, psychotic episodes and brain injury among long-term users. Users report a powerful high and feelings of energy, but this is often teamed with paranoia, hallucinations and uncontrollable violence, especially as the effects wear off.

Prime Minister John Howard last month pledged $150 million to a "war on ice", with the money going to law enforcement and education programs.
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The Age
 
(Merged)

I'd love to know just how they came up with these figures, what the equivalent "social cost" is for something like ecstasy or ketamine and whether they have considered the cost of alcohol.
 
^not sure what that article was quoting, but you could check out Monograph 14 from the Drug Policy Modelling Project:
http://www.dpmp.unsw.edu.au/DPMPWeb.nsf/page/Monographs

The methodology is outlined in the document so you can see where they are getting the numbers from.

I agree - it would be good to see comparative figures for licit drugs too

Interestingly, figures such as these are being used by drug law reform activists (like Alex Wodak) to suggest that our current approaches aren't working - that by far the biggest chunk of the funding pie goes to law enforcement (56% of all State and Federal funding to illicit drug strategies according to ADCA), and that that money could be far more effectively spent.
 
sorry for the late responce

the focus group that i happened to attend was a very diverse group of AOD related workers and researchers at the invitation of families australia here in canberra.

the focus group for professional workers was quite an interesting group to watch, i found that the dicotomus ways of thinking between various fields of expertise caused a lot of friction and served the purpose of strengthening the arguments/opinion and insight almost manic like hysteria about the impact of drugs on the family.

Insert quote/ "wont somebody thik of the children"-simpsons /endquote

in my limited experience i found that alot of professional workers and academics at this meeting had removed free will from the Client/Drug user and focussed on just the problematic "ATS substance users/abusers" with a veiw (my opinion) to paint them (Drug users) with the same brush!!!!!


this discussion was all about ego's clashing in the one room and i hope that families australias director: Brian is smart enough to see through the BS that was propigated by the so called leaders of the AOD field in canberra.

all in all im still not sure if it achieved anything, untill there is a common understanding between professional AOD workers and researchers all policy and legislation will in a knee jerk reaction to moral veiws.



again :(
 
Drug testimony leads to tears
LAURA ANDERSON
CANBERRA
May 24, 2007 02:15am

A FEMALE Liberal MP has been reduced to tears at a parliamentary committee into illicit drug use, after speaking with South Australian Independent MLC Ann Bressington.

Queensland Liberal MP Kay Elson struggled to contain her emotions as she revealed her child had battled drugs.

She told her story after Ms Bressington detailed how she lost her 22-year-old daughter, Shay Louise, to a heroin overdose in 1998.

Ms Elson said she "hadn't heard a thing that sparked my emotion" until she heard Ms Bressington's evidence.

"I have been fighting the fight for six years now," Ms Elson told the committee yesterday.

"I think you have something that works. I have been everywhere, even committed my child to a mental health institution."

"We can cry together," Ms Bressington told her.

The former chief executive of Drugbeat SA told the committee that drug funding needed to be better targeted. She said a clearer definition was needed of harm minimisation.

She was accompanied at the committee by 19-year-old former drug user Ryan Hidden, who openly discussed his addiction to drugs such as ecstasy and methamphetamines.
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The Advertiser
 
The war on drugs is winnable- New Government Report

[EDIT: Threads merged. hoptis]

This is as bad as it gets- politics making a lie out of science. Out of 188 submissions to this Inquiry, 136 were strongly in favour of Harm minimzation. At least 3 demonstrated the real problems with the Swedish model. None of the opinions of the majority of the independent submissions made it to the final report. Instead, the academics have been dismissed as "Drug Industry Elites"... I propose the widespread dissemination and use of the term "The Prohibitionist / Zero Tolerance Brethren", to describe politicians who rely on religion and pseudo-science to baffle and mislead the Australian electorate into believing that they have the slightest idea about drugs policy...:|

http://www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/fhs/illicitdrugs/report.htm#chapters
 
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Adopt out children of drug addicts, committee says
By staff writers and wires
September 13, 2007 08:34pm

THE report of a major parliamentary inquiry released today recommended young children be taken away from drug-addicted parents permanently and adopted out.

The House of Representatives committee today handed down 31 recommendations stemming from its seven-month inquiry into the impact of drug use on families.

They included random drug-testing of teachers and nurses, compulsory treatment for teenage drug addicts and restrictions on methadone programs.

The Liberal-led committee also recommended the withdrawal of funding from drug programs that promote harm minimisation.

The controversial plan was dismissed as "a disgrace" and "frightening" by some anti-drug campaigners.

Liberal MP Bronwyn Bishop, who chaired the inquiry, said the "powerful" recommendations would benefit families of addicts and help win the war on drugs.

The committee called for adoption to be the "default care option" for children aged under five who come to the attention of child protection agents through their parents' drug addiction.

Under the plan, parents would have to make a case for keeping their children, or they would be taken away.

The parents would not be able to get the child back if they became drug free at a later stage, Mrs Bishop said.

She said the committee expected to face criticism for the report but did not think their views were extreme.

Mrs Bishop said the children would benefit from being given "a real chance at life", instead of living with parents who only wanted them to claim welfare payments.

But the Labor members of the committee said such an approach could put children at greater risk.

The Labor members presented a dissenting report which said drug addiction was a more complex issue than the report appeared to suggest.

Approaches that both minimise harm to the addict and their families, and help the user to become drug-free were needed, they said.

But Mrs Bishop said drug services which promoted harm minimisation should be trying to get users off drugs and would lose funding unless that was their aim.

The committee has also recommended a review of needle exchange programs, which would consider whether local communities wanted them.

It also wants the health minister to introduce random workplace testing for anyone working in public hospitals "to improve safety for patients and other staff".

Families and Friends for Drug Law Reform said the report flagrantly disregarded existing evidence and research.

"This report... is a road map to disaster which would bring untold harm and misery on young people and the Australian community," president Brian McConnell said.

"It is a disgrace that a committee of our national parliament should display the ignorance that it has done and close its mind to reason and science."

Dr Alex Wodak, director of St Vincent's Hospital's Alcohol and Drug Service in Sydney, said the report's contents were "frightening".

"It's a disaster as public policy," he said.

He said the report's advocacy for drugs to be considered a moral issue ignored evidence from the US.

About one person in 100,000 contracted HIV in Australia each year, compared to almost 15 in the United States, where a zero tolerance stance meant needle exchange programs could not receive federal funding.

But, he said, Parliament would dissolve within weeks when the election was called, and the next Government would not have to consider the report.

"It's just political posturing," he said.

With Jane Bunce and AAP
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News.com.au
 
What a sad day for Australians. How could could an entire group of educated people simple chuck out the evidence in favour of an emotional diatribe? Adopt out the children of addicts into good families?!! Have no lessons been learned from the stolen generation? Next they'll be sending the military in to aboriginal communities to solve the health problems there.......hang on.....
 
Take children from addicts, inquiry urges
Annabel Stafford Canberra
September 14, 2007

CHILDREN of drug addicts should be put up for adoption and their parents forced to show why the child would be better off remaining at home, a controversial parliamentary inquiry report recommends.

Accusing drug experts and treatment programs of being an industry with an interest in keeping people on drugs, the report calls for a dramatic change in approach. Inquiry chairwoman Liberal MP Bronwyn Bishop said the rhetoric of the "drug industry" was "focused on the user to the detriment of children and other family members" and treatment was underpinned by an attitude "that it's all amoral and … that you don't make a judgement on things being right or wrong".

Among its 31 recommendations, the report calls for children under five — whose parents' drug use is the subject of a child protection notification — to be put up for adoption unless a parent or child protection worker can show the child would be better off remaining with the family.

It also recommends:

■A review of needle exchange programs and their impact on the communities in which they're based;

■Quarantines of child welfare payments to ensure they're spent on food and other essentials;

■Government subsidies for the controversial treatment Naltrexone which causes the body to reject heroin;

■And cuts in government funding for treatment programs that support legalisation of illicit drugs, use language trivialising drug use (such as "recreational drugs"), or don't aim to get their clients "drug-free".

Labor members of the committee lodged a five-page dissenting report but — while saying they supported most of the recommendations — did not individually deal with them.

They did express concern about the view that "addiction alone should determine whether a child is separated from their parent" rather than the more robust test of the best interests and safety of the child.

But many drug experts and families of drug users were scathing.

Tony Trimingham, who founded Family Drug Support in 1997 after his son Damien died of a heroin overdose, said "none of us that has a family member or a child using drugs supports or condones drug use, which is what Bronwyn Bishop seems to be implying". Mr Trimingham believes Damien would be alive if there had been better harm-reduction policies.

But Ann Bressington, who founded DrugBeat SA and became an independent member of the South Australian Parliament after losing her daughter to a heroin overdose, said 22-year-old Shay Louise had died because of harm minimisation. When Shay Louise began smoking marijuana at 13, "I was told to back off, that this was a phase she was going through and would grow out of it … I followed … harm-minimisation to her grave".

John Herron, chairman of the Australian National Council on Drugs and former Howard government minister, said he would consider the report's recommendations, but said current policies, including harm-minimisation, had been highly successful in the past eight years, with fatalities from drug use falling by 70 per cent.
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The Age
 
This is shocking. Though, given Bishop's antics during the inquiry, it's not that surprising that this report is useless and biased. I'm glad there was a dissenting report. Unfortunately that report did not go as far as to condemn zero tolerance and embrace harm minimisation.

ANOTHER reason to vote out Howard et al. whenever this damn election is called!

(we really needed another reason...lol!)

Definitely worth reading Annabel Catt's brothers report (in the appendix). I'm sure if he had mentioned other solutions (like testing, or regulation of supply), his report would not have been included as an appendix. But it was a reasonably balanced message, given the circumstances, IMHO.
 
Drug addicts may lose children
Ben Packham and Karen Collier
September 14, 2007 09:30am

DRUG-addicted parents would lose their kids for good under a plan to protect children from a life of misery.

A federal parliamentary inquiry said adoption should become the "default option" for children up to five whose parents were drug users.

The inquiry heard horrific evidence of children dying, going without food, missing school and being forced to look after siblings because of addicted parents.

Inquiry head Bronwyn Bishop said children were the hidden victims of drug use, and the laws must be changed.

"The new policy must be the best interest of the child not the drug-addicted parent," the Liberal MP said.

The Families and Human Services Committee inquiry also recommended:

REWRITING national schools' drugs policies to emphasise zero tolerance.

PROMOTING contraception for drug-addicted women.

BANNING takeaway methadone for addicted parents who have children living with them.

A BAN on funding for groups that use the terms "recreational" and "party" drugs.

REWARDS for addicts who give up drugs.

The committee heard children were suffering because state agencies and many magistrates preferred to keep kids with their parents.

One case involved the death of a child who ingested 40mg of methadone.

Some drug-addicted mothers were desperate to get their children back from foster carers to get access to family support payments, the committee was told.

In a dissenting report, Labor members of the committee rejected many of the inquiry's conclusions.

They said taking children away from their parents was not always a good idea.

In a special statement in the report, Prime Minister John Howard said his Government would never give up the fight against drugs.

"We will always maintain a zero tolerance approach."
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Herald Sun
 
Punitive response no help on drugs
15 September 2007

Liberal backbencher Bronwyn Bishop is well known for her conservative social views and the forthright manner in which she expresses them. In August 2005, she called for a ban on Muslim headscarves in public schools, and last year she told a federal Young Liberal convention that burning or violating the Australian flag should be made a federal criminal offence. She is also well-known as a strident anti-drugs campaigner. Whether that background makes her ideally suited to chair a 10-member House of Representatives Committee looking at the impact of illicit drug-use on families is open to debate, but such is the uncompromising nature of the committee's report that it would be easy to conclude that Bishop dominated proceedings even though the three Labor MPs wrote a dissenting report.

Among the most controversial of the recommendations is that the infant children of illicit drug-users be put up for adoption, that Centrelink direct drug-using parents to spend their welfare payments only on food and essentials, and that what are disparagingly called "drug industry elites" that is, treatment services, counsellors and research organisations should only receive taxpayer funding if they abandon the philosophy of harm minimisation in favour of zero tolerance. In short, the committee wants the focus of the National Drug Strategy shifted away from harm minimisation to harm prevention and given the specific aim of ensuring that illicit drug-users achieve permanent drug-free status. The best way to wean opioid users off drugs completely, it says, is to make abstinence-based treatments the norm, and it recommends this be given effect by adding Naltrexone (an opioid-antagonist medication) to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.

Notwithstanding the overtones of social engineering one of the recommendations is that contraception and family planning be integrated in the treatment of drug-using women of child-bearing age the approach of the committee shares many of the underpinnings of the other social policies implemented by the Coalition. Indeed its focus on protecting infants and children from the neglect of drug-addicted parents evokes the Government's recent decision to fight child sexual abuse in remote indigenous communities in the Northern Territory by intervening directly in the administration of those settlements.

During its deliberations, the House of Representatives committee heard similarly harrowing stories of the accidental death and ill-treatment of children whose parents were drug-users, and while forcing parents to give up custody of their children might seem like a justifiable response to such neglect, there are many people who fear that implementing such a regime will only discourage parents from seeking treatment.

Many experts who made submissions or were called before the committee are unhappy with its methods and findings. Indeed, they have suggested the hostility shown toward those who argue for the continuation of harm minimisation strategies indicates the majority of committee members were far from open-minded about different drug treatment methods, or were simply determined to deliver findings in tune with the Federal Government's "tough on drugs" approach.

The debate about whether prohibition and tougher law enforcement, allied with strategies to force people to become drug free, is more effective at alleviating the harmful effects and myriad costs of illicit drug-use than harm minimisation is far from settled, of course, even if prohibitionists point to the current heroin drought as proof that being tough on drugs works.

Similar controversy rages about whether substitution treatments, specifically those involving methadone or Buprenorphine to tread opioid dependence are better or worse than opioid-antagonist medications like Naltrexone. The evidence is that both appear to be useful in different circumstances. Opioid substitutes are generally credited with reducing overdose deaths, preventing HIV and reducing criminal behaviour. The downside is that they create dependence in the user, preventing, or complicating a complete break from drug use.

Given the widely differing needs and circumstance of drug-users, it should be self-evident that the prospects of rehabilitation are greatly enhanced by retaining all treatment options, regardless of whether they conform to particular policies or prejudices. In fact, despite Prime Minister John Howard's advocacy for zero tolerance and harm minimisation, Australia maintains a largely pragmatic, outcomes-oriented approach to illicit drugs policy and one based on all the available expert evidence.

It is to be hoped that Bishop's demand for a rethink on drug rehabilitation is recognised for what it is an unreasonably harsh and punitive approach that is more likely to drive drug-users underground than to Naltrexone clinics and that the minister for Families and Community Services, Mal Brough, gives it the response it deserves.
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Canberra Times
 
research organisations should only receive taxpayer funding if they abandon the philosophy of harm minimisation in favour of zero tolerance
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damn, there goes my career!

thank god this report is not to be taken seriously!
 
research organisations should only receive taxpayer funding if they abandon the philosophy of harm minimisation in favour of zero tolerance
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so basically, they're saying they don't really care to know what does and doesn't work, as long as it fits with their own moral codes.
 
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