A SMOKING GUN IN THE DRUGS DEBATE

Dr Alex Wodak's plan to have the Government sell cannabis in little
packets at the post office wasn't just a throwaway line to a bunch of
senile hippies at the Mardi-Grass festival in Nimbin last weekend.

It was part of a considered strategy by the esteemed director (for 26
years) of St Vincent's Hospital's drug and alcohol service to convince
authorities to legalise marijuana and other illicit drugs.

In evidence to last year's inquiry into the impact of illicit drug use
on families by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on
Family and Community Affairs, chaired by Bronwyn Bishop, Wodak again
advocated the legalisation of cannabis, describing it as "the
least-worst option".

Wodak, also president of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation and
the International Harm Reduction Association, asserts that more than 2
million Australians are cannabis users and thus prohibition is a
losing battle.

But just because there are Australians who smoke cannabis is not a
sound reason to legalise the drug, particularly at a time of mounting
scientific evidence of its long-term devastating health effects, in
particular its link to schizophrenia.

It is exactly the wrong time to legalise cannabis, just as its
popularity among young people is diminishing, as shown by the latest
Australian Secondary School Students' Use of Alcohol and Drug Survey.

Cannabis use by 12-to-15 year olds in the previous month plummeted
from 15 per cent in 1996 to 6 per cent in 2005, with the percentage of
12 to 15 year olds who had ever tried cannabis falling from 28 per
cent to 13 per cent. The evidence is that fewer children are even
experimenting with cannabis, which is a far more potent drug today
than it was when Nimbin's hippies were young.

While the 6 per cent of young teens who are monthly tokers is still a
worry, the trend is distinctly downward after two decades of rising
drug use.

That is a success in anyone's language and it is perverse for Wodak
and others in the "helping" professions to deny that success, and pour
scorn on the federal "Get Tough on Drugs" approach that underpins it,
and which the Rudd Government has shown no signs of
dismantling.

Rather than drug harm-minimisation advocates admitting they are wrong
and that their careers up to this point were misguided, they have
stepped up their attacks, describing the so-called War on Drugs as a
failure and those who disagree as "zealots", "ideologues" and
"evangelists". But this is the pot calling the kettle black, for what
else do you call people who refuse to change their minds in the face
of overwhelming evidence but zealots?

Even harm minimisers admit that legalising cannabis will create more
cannabis users - because the stigma associated with breaking the law
will no longer apply. Thus we would expect more mental health problems.

But Wodak has minimised evidence of the link between cannabis and
mental illness, both at Nimbin last weekend and to the Bishop inquiry,
when he said: "Cannabis probably does not precipitate severe mental
illness in people who have not been previously mentally ill."

It is irresponsible for a doctor in his position to play down serious
research showing the link between marijuana and schizophrenia, and not
just for those who are already psychotic.

What he is doing is no different from the tobacco industry denying the
links between smoking and lung cancer.

Medical opinion is moving against him, with the journal The Lancet, on
July 28 last year, recanting its 1995 editorial which claimed smoking
cannabis was not harmful to health, and citing studies which showed
"an increase in risk of psychosis of about 40 per cent in participants
who had ever used cannabis".

Another long-term Swedish study of 50,465 Swedish Army conscripts has
found those who had tried marijuana by age 18 had 2.4 times the risk
of being diagnosed with schizophrenia in the following 15 years than
those who had never used the drug. Heavy users were 6.7 times more
likely to be admitted to hospital for schizophrenia.

In a study of 1037 people in Dunedin, New Zealand, those who used
cannabis at ages 15 and 18 had higher rates of psychotic symptoms at
age 26 than non-users. In both studies, the link between cannabis and
psychosis remained even after controlling for the possibility that
people had pre-existing symptoms.

Wodak also claimed this week that cannabis "is soon going to be
consumed by more people than tobacco". But the facts just don't
support his assertion. According to the United Nations the number of
smokers worldwide has grown, from 1.1 billion in 1998 to a projected
1.3 billion in 2010, whereas only 147 million people consume cannabis.
It will take a lot of Nicorette patches before cannabis replaces
tobacco as the world's most widely-smoked drug.

For a full demolition of the soft-on-drugs approach, the Bishop report
is a goldmine, concluding: "The evidence received ... in the course of
this inquiry has shown there is a drug industry which pushes harm
reduction and minimisation at the expense of harm prevention and
treatment [which has as its aim] making an individual drug free."

The inquiry found the push for legalisation of illicit drugs flies in
the face of overseas evidence. Sweden, once a harm minimisation
pioneer, has learnt from bitter experience, adopting a restrictive
drug policy, criminalising illicit drug use, and providing early
intervention and treatment, with spectacular results.

Last year a UN review of Swedish drug policy found: "The vision of a
drug-free society ... has, on occasion, been derided as 'unrealistic',
'not pragmatic' and 'unresponsive' to the needs of drug abusers ... The
ambitious goal of the drug-free society has been questioned ...
Nevertheless ... the prevalence and incidence rates of drug abuse have
fallen in Sweden while they have increased in most other European
countries. It is perhaps that ambitious vision that has enabled Sweden
to achieve this remarkable result."

Which brings us back to Wodak. Isn't it about time that the Mercy nuns
who founded St Vincent's Hospital account for their head of drug and
alcohol services?