lil angel15
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Bishop misfires in shallow aims of one-eyed war on drugs
19 September 2007
John Ryan
Drugs are a hard issue. Ask anyone with a drug-using son or daughter. No one in the world has discovered the formula to stop societal drug use, but plenty are making a profit from it, and not just drug dealers.
Drugs and mental illness is a complex area and we are still learning, whether police, scientist, parent or policymaker. We can get caught up in reaching for miracle cures and simple "magic bullet" solutions, outlandish claims and hallucinations.
The latest misfire is Bronwyn Bishop's parliamentary committee report, The winnable war on drugs: The impact of illicit drug use on families, an artefact of shallow thinking. Bishop has sadly followed the wrong leads and aimed at the wrong enemy. Her inspiration comes from Drug Free Australia (DFA), the dads' army of illegal drugs policy in Australia. She has taken up this policy agenda and elevated moralism over the suffering of fellow Australians grappling with drug problems, and she has been suckered into celebrating their pet hates. The DFA approach is to attack outspoken harm reductionist Dr Alex Wodak and others who are determined to reduce the burden of drugs. Harm reduction has the audacious premise that drug use has a very long history. That we must apply ourselves to the reality that hundreds of thousands of Australians have broken the law and to be responsible we must have policies that respond to this, rather than the pyrrhic "just say no".
At the DFA conference earlier this year, there was a failure to be enriched by diverse perspectives and to rise above petty personal attacks to address these difficult issues. There was applause when individuals (who weren't there) were maligned. They were referred to as "the other side".
Like Bishop, some speakers even held dedicated professionals responsible for our drug problems. Wodak, a drug-treatment physician, supporter of harm minimisation and highly regarded all over the world, is DFA's bete noir.
Science, evidence and compassion are sacrificed on the altar of Bishop and DFA's twisted logic that people wanting to reduce the harm from drugs are actually responsible for creating the problem. Just like the argument at the conference that condoms are fuelling the HIV epidemic.
The conference even went to the extent of flying in one of DFA's purists, Dr Kerstin Kall, of Scandinavia. How does the obscure, hardly published Kall gain Bishop's attention to supposedly unravel the evidence of harm-minimisation programs in Australia, including the internationally successful needle and syringe programs?
There is an escape clause for Kall though: according to the strong praise and amens (literally) of the delegates, the scientific standards are an enormous conspiracy too. Peer-reviewed academic journals are not truth-seeking research journals aimed at improving knowledge and building our civilisation, they are just pedlars of pap and, in the drugs area, dominated by the legalisers and other enemies of the people, "the other side".
I support harm reduction as a viable public-health approach to drug issues. Harm reduction coexists with interdiction, but for Bishop they are mutually exclusive. She mischievously forgets it is the drug pedlars, with no regard for our community but with enormous financial clout, who should be a key focus of our attention and interdiction rather than ordinary Australians struggling with their drug problems. These criminals hold hard-working, community-minded and compassionate Australians in contempt. They should make us all worry. They are misery profiteers, willing to corrupt our police and judiciary, and to pay no tax. But at the DFA gig, and in Bishop's report, Wodak got more negative attention.
In the worst tradition of political correctness, Bishop wants to change the language from harm minimisation to harm prevention.
This is not a great leap forward, but it is code for dismantling Australia's global leadership in drugs policy. This ideological posturing is reprehensible.
For the past 20 years Australia has taken a comprehensive approach to drug use, and it is called harm minimisation. It includes police and drug treatment as well as interventions for current users. The "war on drugs" is a re-badge, but part of the Australian tradition, aiming to balance supply control with interventions for people who are using, including drug treatments, and needle and syringe programs.
Bishop wants to move the goal posts so that anyone who delivers and supports harm-minimisation programs in Australia should be de-funded. The result would be worse drug problems and more lives lost. I wish we could eradicate drugs too, but let us stay real and seriously engage with a global phenomenon.
Seeing drugs are already banned, Bishop wants to ban words. Words like "recreational drugs" because it sends the "wrong message". That this is a priority when people are losing their sons and daughters to drugs is reprehensible. Bishop is yet to figure that "ice" sounds really cool, but sooner or later we won't be able to describe this pernicious form of amphetamines in shorthand.
These are not socialists whining about correct language, but drug zealots carping about conspiracy theories of endless mendacity. They tut-tut together about evil language being used as a beach-head in efforts to spread drug use.
Even the Minister for Ageing, Christopher Pyne, acknowledged at the DFA conference that in a liberal democracy we must indulge a diversity of opinion. He even celebrated the fact that he had sponsored conferences where some speakers criticised the Government.
At the recent Anex Mental Health and Illegal Drugs Conference, attended by more than 400 harm-reduction workers in Australia, there was a thematic thread to the sessions: stick with the evidence and lead with compassion. I wish Bishop could have been there perhaps her opinion and the resulting recommendations would have been more balanced and founded.
John Ryan is chief executive officer of Anex, the Association for Prevention and Harm Reduction Programs, Australia.
Canberra Times