TIME FOR A DRUGS CHANGE

What should be central to the drugs debate in Australia is that the
national number of heroin deaths is expected to top 1000 this year.

In 1964, the heroin death toll was just six, even three decades later in
1997 it was "only" about 800.

The number of heroin deaths this year will be more thant twice the total
number of young Australians killed in nearly a decade of fighting in the
Vietnam War. And if the death toll from heroin overdose continues to rise
at the present rate, it will soon exceed the national road toll (there were
1759 road deaths in Australia last year).

Despite record arrests by police and record seizures of the drugs this
year's Australian Illicit Drug Report said first-time heroin use jumped by
50% over three years.

Death from opiod overdose has become not only a national epidemic but a
national scandal and disgrace.

Most of those who die from heroin overdoses do so in back alleys of towns
and cities, either alone or in the company of other drug users who are too
stoned or too scared to go for help because they think they will get in
trouble with the law.

There is a way in which this heroin death toll would - or at least might -
be dramatically reduced. Even if heroin remained an illegal substance, it
could be less of a killer if there were medically supervised injecting
centres - shooting galleries as they are known colloquially - in areas of
high drug use.

Socially progressive governments in New South Wales, Victoria and the ACT
have all been trying to set up such safe injecting rooms as a trial, to
find out to what extent there would be a reduction on the heroin death toll
if addicts could shoot up in the relative safety of somewhere that they can
be given help if something goes wrong; somewhere where they would also be
counselled and encouraged to try to kick their drug habit.

But in all three cases, conservative "zero tolerance" forces hove managed
to hold out so far against injecting centres, despite the certainty they
would save at least some lives. The argument is it would send the "wrong
message" and make illicit drugs more socially acceptable if they were given
official or semi-official tolerance in injecting rooms.

The counter question is: What message does it send to have 1000 mainly
young Australians dying in the back alleys of the nation because there is
nobody there to help them stay alive long enough to try to get clean of drugs?

This week came news that the United Nations International Narcotics Control
Board, while expressing concern about the prospect of injecting room
trials, is offering no support to Prime Minister John Howard's claims that
the trials would breach Australia's obligations under international drug
control treaties. In a report to the Federal Government the board was
conspicuously silent on that question. Coincidentally, Labor leader Kim
Beazley announced he had dropped his opposition to trials of prescription
of heroin to addicts. He also supported a range, of measures including
supervised injecting rooms and subsidised treatment of addicts with the
detoxification drug naltrexone.

Said Beazley: "The evidence is if you actually keep people alive they will
kick the habit: they'll get through it."

Sadly though, the Prime Minister's tough-on-drugs position has, if
anything, hardened. A planned $16 million anti-drug campaign was postponed
after his office challenged the content of an educational guide produced by
the Australian National Council on drugs, as not tough and uncompromising
enough.

John Howard's approach is hostile to the extension of the successful free
syringe progrem by also providing a safe place for addicts to inject. The
free syringe program has operated in Australia for more than 20 years and
is credited with keeping Australia at the forefront of the battle against
HIV and hepatitis -- tangible evidence of the success of the
harm-minimisation approach.

The authoritarian, prohibition and lock-'em-up policies pioneered by the
United States and embraced by John Howard, have failed.

Injecting rooms are not the whole answer, but it is time to trial a range
of alternatives -- injecting rooms, heroin prescription trials, drug
courts, naltrexone treatment, combined with increased law enforcement
against suppliers and importers. The lives of too many of our children are
at risk to not at least try.