LET'S TRY A SUMMIT OF THE SENSIBLE

Can this be right? That the Victorian Government is budgeting $25 million a
year to pay for intervention in the drug business? They must be joking.

Add to that sum the amount spent on police and prisons that would not have
to be spent if we didn't have the problem and you are looking at one new
hospital or school at the very least. This is sheer lunacy.

Former police commissioner Neil Comrie says that 70 per cent of all crime is
drug related; and 26,000 drug-related offences were committed last year and
331 people died of overdoses. It is clear that prohibition does not work,
but it seems that the experts who assembled at Parliament House on Wednesday
could not come up with anything better than more of the same strategies that
have failed spectacularly.

Mr Comrie also said that nothing was ever going to get any better as long as
drugs were a political issue. Parties in opposition will always obstruct and
frustrate government initiatives because they believe that anything that
embarrasses the government increases their chances of getting onto the
Treasury benches.

Mr Napthine and his offsiders are deluding themselves if they think that
there are any votes in drugs, one way or the other. Not one citizen is going
to give drugs a minute's thought when she goes to the polls next time
around. She is not going to cast her vote out of gratitude to the brave
Tories who have held the line against molly-coddling the addicts.

Although, if we wanted to be really paranoid, we can see how prohibition is
linked to the law-and-order vote. As long as drugs are prohibited, crime
will increase. This will lead to community fear and a demand for more police
and tougher sentences. The Tories probably have the edge over the
pseudo-socialists in the law-and-order plausibility stakes. So you can see
how an apparently obscurantist attitude to drugs could be politically
beneficial to them. But could they be such cynical opportunists?
Politicians?

Why were church leaders invited to the meeting? What special expertise do
they have on the subject that makes them more appropriate participants than
ironmongers or cobblers? They may moralise from their lofty pulpits, but
they don't know any more about the issue than anyone else and they are more
likely to favor prohibition because that fits best with their traditional
line of business.

Archbishop George Pell laments the transfer of moral authority from the
church to the media and then proposes that the solution might be a "media
campaign" to change the "dominant culture". Surely he must have been
misreported. The electronic media already spread moral confusion by
pontificating on drug use editorially and glamorising it in their
entertainment programs. A few ads here and there will only compound the
confusion.

I even have some suspicions about the objectivity of street workers and
youth workers. Although admiring them for doing what few of us would like to
do, we have to face the fact that they do tend to talk about the problem in
social worker's jargon and to generalise about addicts.

Not all addicts have been sexually abused. Not all come from bad homes where
their parents didn't love them or encourage them. Some did and some didn't.
My guess is that the only thing that they might all have in common is a
desire to break the nexus with the dealers so they have a way out of the
criminal activities that support the habit.

What is needed is a drug summit of sensible people, sans politicians,
parsons and social workers. I am imagining people with no vested interest in
the business, just people of good will and common sense. I predict their
first recommendation, after careful consideration of all the facts, would be
the creation of a register of addicts who could get their drugs from
government pharmacies. It would cost less than $25 million a year and do a
lot more.