A VERY PERSONAL ODYSSEY

Until the Drug Summit, Bob Carr was a complete conservative on heroin
reform. Two years on, he talks to Deborah Cameron about his full circle and
conversion to pragmatism over morality.

Bob Carr is between anger and fatigue. He is remembering how he handed tea
and biscuits to a 20-year-old heroin addict and searched the young man's
face for an answer. "Why?" was his question.

"They shrug,"Carr says with despair. "They shrug as they take a terrible
risk with their own health."

It's something he'll neither understand nor forget. Even in an office 40
floors above a city that always looks perfect from a distance, thoughts of
drugs waft in.

"I can't think of a day when this whole area isn't on my mind one way and
another," Carr says. "I've got to admit to an irritation, even a weariness,
that the human animal is so gullible about something like heroin.

"For goodness sake! How often have people got to be told that this is
monstrously addictive. That the joy of anaesthetic oblivion is paid for by
a desperate dependency. How many times have people got to be told this?"

It is two years since the 1999 NSW Drug Summit, a pivotal event for Carr,
and one that changed his mind and, in a sense, radicalised him. He has gone
from a position of zero-tolerance on drugs to being an open-minded
supporter of experiments such as the Kings Cross safe heroin injecting room
and medical trials of cannabis for the acutely ill.

"It's not a moral argument. It is an argument about what is effective and
what policies work. We're feeling our way ... and I have a sense that we've
got the trust of the community."

The change of heart has been described by the Australian MedicalAssociation
as Carr "moving himself from a position of intransigence".Before the Drug
Summit, Carr was a prohibitionist who had no time for talk about loosening
up laws. He would not agree to the extension into NSW of a proposed
heroin-dispensing trial, stood against the decriminal-isation of heroin and
cannabis, stiffened up jail terms and cast himself generally as a complete
conservative on the topic. That was then.

This is now: "There is a case for sticking with a trial of a medically
supervised injecting room, likewise on the medical use of cannabis. I think
that it carries weight with normally conservative opinion."

In his dark, square-shouldered suit and cufflinks Carr, 53, is of another
era. He drinks warm water from a dainty teapot with thin lemon slices.
Unsweetened.

When he was a boy at Matraville High School, drugs practically did not
exist. If not exactly innocent, it was certainly a quieter time. He says
that he's never even smoked pot.

"What would have happened, though, if it had been pushed at me? And spoken
about on the way to school and on the way home from school and over the
weekends?"

He's wondering aloud whether he'd have buckled. About the difference it
would have made if he too had shrugged. Other people around him did; his
younger brother, Gregory, died of an overdose. On a rare occasion when he
has spoken about it, he has unemotionally said: "Greg's death made me more
interested in this policy area than I would otherwise have been."

And there have been other times he has felt it closely. He recalls a recent
meeting with a senior adviser, "someone who could do my job".

"We were sitting at this very table. I was talking about The Salvation Army
approach, which is abstinence-based. And I wondered out loud about the
success rate ... and he said, 'It worked for me.' He was referring to a
heroin addiction in his youth."

Apart from regarding the admission as "very impressive", Carr also thinks
that the experience of his reformed policy adviser is the kind of evidence
that is needed when a government reshapes drugs policy.

"I say let's trial, let's experiment on many fronts. Let's be ruthlessly
pragmatic, let's be totally empirical when it comes to approaches to
treatment. It is a shift from a monolithically prohibitionist system."

That image - of the monolith, the prohibitionist - being dislodged is
striking. Behind it is years of wearying experience seen from behind the
broad expanse of a premier's desk.

The delegations of worried police, health officials, teachers, counsellors,
employers, parents and victims who have faced him across it and wanted him
to see the picture as they see it.

"At the end of the Olympics I said that this had to be the most blessed
land and the happiest people at the best time in their history ... The one
real blemish is the persistence of a deep-seated and widespread problem
with drugs.

"It tarnishes our national life. It explains so much of crime; it's related
to problems of depression, it's related to suicide in the young; it
explains a lot of homelessness and mental illness.

"It really is the soft underbelly of Australian life at this time. Because
I help make policies I am driven to think [of drugs] all the time and I'm
conscious that we are managing a given situation."

He worries that there is "something about Australians" that explains the
nation's attraction to illegal drugs and looks forward "to the day when we
move beyond this".

"Is it related to old-fashioned drinking in Australia, the 6 o'clock swill?
The sustained alcohol abuse you've seen in city and country at different
times in our history? It might reflect a certain hedonism - you can't be
definitive about it."

In 1989, Carr wrote an article for the Heraldoutlining his position against
the legalisation of heroin, which was then being proposed as the only way
to solve the problem.

"I hope it's not melodramatic to say this debate raises that old question
of, 'What kind of a society do we want to be?"Carr wrote.

He disputed that anyone really knew what would happen to a society where
heroin was legal and defied supporters of the idea to explain the nuts and
bolts of organising such a system.

"To say 'use of these drugs is against the law' is still an important and
useful statement. If we remove that sanction, apart from anything else, we
massively undercut all our anti-drug education. Why would any school
student believe official warnings about the deleterious effects of heroin
when it is being handed out at government dispensaries?" he wrote.

He says that his position on decriminalising banned drugs remains unchanged
and will not concede that there is an inconsistency in allowing the safe
heroin injecting room or cannabis trials in medical cases for the relief of
suffering.

He has not, he insists, abandoned his long-standing zero tolerance position.

"I believe in zero tolerance when it comes to drugs in schools, I believe
in zero tolerance when it comes to someone getting rich dealing in large
quantities of heroin and causing misery and death. But I also believe in
harm minimisation by shifting the heroin use from a filthy alleyway or a
car park into a medically supervised environment that is an entry point for
rehabilitation."

But he is at the same time cautious about the injecting room because it was
not a remedy for heroin addiction: "It will make a difference at the
margins only if it makes a difference at all. This is a hugely complex
problem."

On cannabis, he says that it should remain illegal because it was harmful.

"I concede all the difficulties: that it is widely used, that it is a
different category to heroin. But often in public policy you have to choose
between the distasteful and the disastrous."

Ultimately he says he wants to be guided by research and evidence.

He keeps asking people in drug education: "What works?" They say that peers
have more influence than teachers or parents. Perhaps sports people are
effective too, he says, questioning the idea even as he utters it.

"But you've got rock stars referring to drug use and movies full of
references to it. We are managing a given situation and in some contexts
zero tolerance is valid and in other contexts it is harm minimisation."

Every so often, Carr goes to a movie theatre. Last time it was to see
Traffic, a film about a conservative judge appointed by the US president to
be an anti-drug tsar only to find out that his teenage daughter is a heroin
addict. It is about the way the law struggles against drugs and the
futility of it.

"The scene on the plane when the drug czar says to his staff 'We need some
new thinking' and there's a resonant silence. That rings true," Carr says.

The second scene that echoes involves a schoolboy who asks how long a
middle-class suburb would last if every hour of every day people were
cruising the streets tempting others into the life.

Picture the Premier, sitting in the dark with the music swirling all
around, his thoughts drifting back to Matraville.

The Premier's Journey

1982: Brother Gregory dies of a heroin overdose. Carr stridently against
any drug liberalisation laws.

1989: Writes newspaper article putting case against legalising heroin.

1997: Restates opposition to decriminalising heroin.

May 1999: After Drug Summit, leaves door open for setting up injecting
rooms but remains wary of liberalising cannabis laws.

May 2001: Injecting room opens in Kings Cross; he hints strongly at
allowing medical patients to grow five marijuana plants, for use in pain
relief, without being prosecuted.