HEROIN TRIALS ARE WORTH CONSIDERING

The proposal by the National Crime Authority that heroin addicts be
supplied with heroin as part of a wider approach to the drug problem is
surely one of the most controversial interventions in the long-running
drugs debate. According to the NCA chairman Gary Crooke, when it comes to
trying to roll back the impact of drugs on society which the NCA estimates
cost Australia $1.7 billion a year "anything should be considered, nothing
should be rejected". Predictably, Prime Minister John Howard rejected the
suggestion out of hand, declaring that his government would not give
support to any state that countenanced a heroin trial code for saying that
the Commonwealth would block it. Mr Howard went further, arguing that the
assertion that authorities were losing the war on drugs was not backed up
by the evidence. This is surely news not just to the NCA but to other
senior members of the law enforcement establishment including New South
Wales police chief Peter Ryan, who yesterday stated point blank that
authorities were losing the war on drugs.

Others with knowledge of the area, including the president of the
Australian Medical Association, Kerryn Phelps, and the directors of public
prosecutions from New South Wales and South Australia, all said the time
had come to consider all options in fighting drugs.

A regrettable degree of opportunism and straight-out denial seems to inform
the zero tolerance approach of Mr Howard, members of his government and others.

Yesterday a lawyer and short-lived former head of the NCA, Peter Faris,
called for the NCA to be supplanted by the Australian Federal Police. But
Mr Faris is now much better known as a hardline activist for a residents'
group whose main aim is to drive heroin addicts out of the Melbourne CBD.

The sad fact is that even if the steep rise in the death toll from heroin,
after increasing rapidly in the late 1990s, has tapered off recently, the
drug problem continues to be a tragedy of immense proportions. Too much
time and effort is spent on the diversionary argument by zero tolerance
advocates about sending mixed signals to the community in the event of
legalised drug trials or supervised injecting rooms.

Hard drugs are bad. The law says so. Society agrees.

But lives are being lost and even greater numbers of lives are being
damaged or ruined under the current legal regime.

This is not the best we can do. This newspaper does not argue for
liberalisation as a blanket policy.

It should be applied only as a way of lessening the effects of drugs on
individuals and the wider community.

That is why the NCA's proposals deserve to be heard, debated and considered
in a genuine fashion. The current approach is not working effectively
enough and is making it easier, not harder, for criminals to prosper.

This generation of policymakers owes it to future generations to look
afresh at its own attitudes.