A FATHER WHO REFUSES TO RETREAT INTO SILENCE

WHEN Tony Trimingham told me he expected to get dumped from the Prime
Minister's main drug advisory body, the Australian National Council on
Drugs, his regret was faintly tinged with hope that he might be wrong.

Tony Trimingham is irrepressible because he refuses to let his son Damien's
death from a heroin overdose become just another statistic in our presently
futile approach to illicit drugs.

Trimingham is what I call "an inconvenient man". He has steadfastly refused
to abandon his campaign for safe injecting facilities and heroin trials,
because to do so would imply that his son's death was somehow invited or
acceptable.

His insistence goes beyond the polite and academic disagreement on the
council that the PM's supercilious approach will tolerate. As long as our
destination is a relaxed and comfortable Australia, the Tony Triminghams of
this world become the human jetsam. Just ask Patrick Dodson.

Sadly however, it is not just the standard-bearers like Tony who are fed to
the sharks. Insidiously, all the people whom they seek to represent now and
in the future go overboard with them.

In Trimingham's case, that means about 1000 people a year dying from heroin
overdoses, and around 2700 a year dying from drug-related causes. It
continues to mean that about 90 per cent of our jail inmates are
incarcerated because of drug-related activities, at a cost of about $60,000
a head per year.

Our governments have allowed the community to become inured to these
statistics, which is why I have devoted so little space to them. I suspect
that this is also why Tony Trimingham has grated on the powers that be at
the National Council on Drugs.

At the end of the day, Tony is unable to shrug off his defeats as bitter
experience. Because when Tony and people like him go home, these statistics
become the images of other families' Damiens lying needlessly and
wastefully dead at the end of a syringe.

The incessant chorus of victims, inescapable to the bereaved, means that
the Tony Triminghams of the world can never retreat.

A month later, the whispers of discord among new and remaining members of
the council remain a signature symptom of the Federal Government's "divide
and conquer" approach.

Once again, the illicit-drug issue has some eerie similarities to the issue
of reconciliation.

Tony Trimingham has no argument with the diversity of people and approaches
represented on the council. He has publicly applauded the ability for such
diversity to be assembled around the same table.

It is because of this patient tolerance that Trimingham must be silenced.

There is a real threat that otherwise he might persuade the Australian
community about the urgent need to keep existing drug users alive long
enough, so that they too might benefit from the complex mosaic of solutions
which the council is developing.

Tony Trimingham does not pretend that his views address the complete
spectrum of illicit-drug issues, nor all the victims of it. However, he is
rightly insistent that his particular constituency those who will die each
year is entitled to the same investment and concern as the bigger and
admittedly more palatable group of people who should be educated not to try
drugs in the first place.

Trimingham is a source of inconvenience even to himself. His is a frenetic
life, living from one month to the next, running the meagrely resourced
Family Drug Support foundation.

He would be the first to vouch for the merit of a relaxed and comfortable
society, providing that everyone gets a crack at it.

The illicit-drug issue, like reconciliation, is too fundamentally important
to become the victim of politics inspired by darkness and spite.

Trimingham deserved another term on the Prime Minister's drug advisory
council and, sadly, his dumping will diminish the work of those who remain.

It is equally ironic that the dismissal will do nothing to boost the image
of the Government nor those who assisted in orchestrating this treachery.

As for Tony Trimingham, he'll wear the rejection as a badge of honour.

And so he should.