I HOPE FOR SANITY ON DRUGS DOWN UNDER

Your recent publications concerning drug-law reform, treatment diversion,
and safe-injection houses have been followed closely by the US
drug-treatment community.

Your bottom line is starting to sound like ours. Drugs business is
responsible for more income than any other form of tax-free import here
it's larger than General Motors. The criminal-justice system has come to
depend on incarceration and mandatory sentencing laws to justify their
budgets. The drug-treatment 'industry' is an immense cottage industry
outside of the medical establishment, dedicated to abstinence, which
assures a never-ending stream of relapsing addicts to soak up dollars for
treatment programs staffed by recovering addicts. Sound familiar?

Addiction is a medical problem, a chronically relapsing illness, that
sometimes goes into remission (about 4 per cent annually), just like any
similar condition.

Physicians are scared of addicts, because to treat them you still have to
use addictive drugs to wean them away from the dependence, treat their
underlying mental problems, or maintain those who don't go into remission
spontaneously.

Only when the public demands a medical ' cure' to addiction, just like AIDS
or cancer, will there be effective means to stop this epidemic. In the
meantime, the legal and legislative establishments are going to continue
having a field day making money off the poor untreated addicts.

Perhaps if you looked at Scotland or Switzerland, you would find much more
effective solutions. In the US this appears impossible just too much money
and too large an Establishment benefiting from the status quo.

I hope Australia won't fall prey to the same dilemma. Eventually it will
bankrupt all of you. Don't get fooled over the contretemps concerning one
legal shooting gallery. That's just the death knell for the Establishment.
At this distance, I am praying for more sanity from Australia.

William A. Rohde, MD Boston, USA