Hard line on drugs is a labour of love
February 5, 2004
ACADEMIC theorists who believe drug addiction is a victimless crime
and can be resolved by harm minimisation are wrong, Brian Watters tells
PIERS AKERMAN.
The Federal ALP's soft approach to hard drugs will be a key election
issue, but Prime Minister John Howard's hard-line zero tolerance approach has the support of one of those who knows the despair of addiction, retired Salvation Army major Brian Watters.
Major Watters, the chairman of the Australian National Council on Drugs (ANCD), has spent a lifetime dealing with addicts at the coal face.
For much of his life, he has worked with drunks and drug addicts and is driven by his experience with countless numbers of families devastated by the scourge of drugs and alcohol.
He has seen the corpses of those who have died of drug overdoses, the bodies of those who have suicided in despair, and has brought comfort to the children, the parents and the grandparents of those struggling with their addictions.
He has no time for the academic theorists who claim that harm minimisation policies may work and he has less time for those who claim drug abuse is a victimless crime. He has seen the damage wrought on communities by those too selfish to understand that their actions affect everyone around them.
He is, however, also a man of compassion and a man of learning, with a degree in sociology and a major in medical sociology. His wife Margaret, a family and addictions counsellor, is also deeply involved in his work.
Reasonably, he says harm minimisation in itself was not a bad concept, but in its true form it was designed to help drug addicts not only minimise the harm they caused themselves while moving towards becoming more drug free, but also to minimise the harm they caused to their community.
Harm minimisation proselytisers today have perverted those goals.
"Drug addicts are not necessarily people from abusive backgrounds," he told me in Perth, where the Prime Minister announced a further $6.5 million funding for community groups dealing with drugs.
"Addicts are just as often from very pampered, wealthy backgrounds, but they are saddled with some angst or trauma they aren't dealing with and they try to wipe out the reality.
"The Alcoholics Anonymous organisation has a saying that the problem is not in the bottle, it's in the man. We try to get addicts to respond to their problems."
Major Watters has looked at the so-called evidence put forward by harm minimisation advocates and has no hesitation in declaring it flawed. Australian Federal Police commissioner Mick Keelty supports his view.
In the minds of both men, harm minimisation practices such as the embracing of the Kings Cross drug injecting room do little more than provide addicts with a drug market.
"The ambulance call-out rates have dropped in Cabramatta and increased in the Cross," he said.
"The number of ODs in the injecting room is greater than on the street.
"The aim must be to get people off drugs, not support their on- going destructive and illegal activities. There hasn't been one referral from the drug injecting room to the largest treatment organisations in NSW - We Help Ourselves, Odyssey House and the Salvos," he said.
"Drug addiction is not a victimless crime. It destroys parents, families, kids and loved ones."
Major Watters said he was tired of hearing people say it was their "right" to decide what they did with their bodies when the same people were often the first in the queue to grab social security benefits.
"It's pure selfishness," he said. "They just don't feel they need to contribute anything to society, just take from it."
A member of a traditional Labor family (Major Watters knew the widow of the iconic former Labor prime minister John Curtin during his youth), he is an unlikely supporter of the Prime Minister, but he firmly believes that Mr Howard's approach is correct.
"During the Depression my father bought flour at cost and baked bread for the unemployed in Perth," he said. "The big bakeries fought him and tried to prevent him obtaining flour, but he kept going. He used to ride on the bakers' union float in the Labor Day parade until he died of alcoholism."
Major Watters almost became a journalist, but was forced to make the choice between working on Sundays or playing cornet in the Salvation Army band.
"My wife jokes that I have always been a magnet for troubled people," he says. "If I'm riding on public transport it always seems that those with problems come and sit beside me."
He is particularly upset by the government funding (nearly half a million dollars) that flows to drug users' groups.
He says the money was meant to assist in disease prevention and help prevent the spread of HIV AIDS, but it is now being misused to promote a political agenda designed to achieve the legalisation of drugs.
The extra funding announced on Tuesday by the Prime Minister will go to almost 90 small organisations around the country, with most receiving about $80,000. Major Watters says that money will be extremely important to those in need.
"We're seeing grandparents picking up the pieces and struggling to look after their grandchildren who have been abandoned by their parents," he said.
"The addicts in their iniquitous soul-destroying world of substance abuse don't understand the love and hope we have invested in them."
