THE DRUGS BAN-WAGON

There's a tough new alliance against drugs, write David Marr and Paola
Totaro, and it will only take "no" for an answer.

Another amazing week in drug politics. The Prime Minister's office is found
reworking expert advice to try to fit the hardline policies of John Howard.
The ACT Government is almost destroyed by plans to open a medically
supervised injecting room. The Victorian Premier, Steve Bracks, faces a
wild community backlash over his plans for safe injecting rooms and the
Uniting Church in Melbourne is so wracked with division on the issue that
the board of the Wesley Mission stands down.

Meanwhile, Sydney waits and waits for its own injecting room to open in
Kings Cross, delayed first by Rome's veto on Catholic Church participation
and now by the hesitation of police and the squabbles of local businesses
and residents.

Political change does not come much more painful than this.

Michael Moore, the ACT's Health Minister, who has been in the thick of the
fighting this week, is convinced that what seemed at first a series of
last-ditch stands against injecting rooms has evolved into a movement
against harm minimisation.

"I think it is extraordinarily dangerous," he says.

In order to survive, the minority ACT Government of Kate Carnell has
postponed the opening of Canberra's injecting room until January 2002 at
the earliest. In the ACT at the moment, heroin overdoses are running at the
rate of nine a week.

The fundamental political dispute here is between those whose first
response to the heroin epidemic is to save lives and those who insist,
first, on getting addicts off the drug.

Both sides are passionately sincere. The "harm minimisers" see addiction as
a medical problem - a chronic, relapsing disease that may, for some, be
cured if they live long enough.

The others see the drug epidemic as essentially a legal and moral problem -
an issue of crime and sin. For them, the only first step is to get addicts
clean, and if there is danger and squalor and disease along the way, all
that can play its part in persuading people to abandon drugs. They talk of
more police and zero tolerance.

Howard is the leader of this "tough on drugs" party, opposing medical
treatments that make addiction safer, choosing to invest huge resources in
the drugs war in the hope that policing will choke off supply. This hope
has so far been unrealised anywhere in the world.

Australia pioneered one of the most successful "harm minimisation" policies
in the 1980s: the free syringe program which over the past 20 years or so
has become tolerated in suburbs across Australia. Opposition flares
occasionally, but Australia generally accepts that abundant clean needles
keep HIV and hepatitis out of the general community.

Now, governments in NSW, the ACT and Victoria want to take what appeared to
be the next, natural step - to provide places where addicts can inject
themselves under medical supervision in order to cut the rate of overdose
deaths.

Opposition to this has lately become fierce and took a fresh direction last
month when the Salvation Army's Major Brian Watters held a three-day
talkfest at Parliament House in Sydney.

Watters was handpicked by Howard in 1998 to chair the Australian National
Council on Drugs, originally seen as a pluralist, non-government, source of
advice to the Prime Minister. Howard picked Watters because he was a vocal
opponent of harm minimisation policies. They hardly knew each other then.
They have drawn closer since.

Patrons of Watters's June talkfest included Kevin Manning, the Catholic
Bishop of Parramatta, Harry Goodhew, the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, the
born-again Christian and jockey Darren Beadman and the Superintendent of
the Sydney Wesley Mission, the Rev Gordon Moyes.

Local and international speakers were bound together by hostility to
injecting rooms, opposition to the "softening" of drug laws, and a common
passion for winding back "dangerous" harm minimisation policies such as
needle exchange.

The keynote speaker was Malou Lindholm, a Swedish green and former member
of the European Parliament, who delivered a striking mix of unsourced
statistics on the "success" of Sweden's tough anti-drug laws, and a call to
mobilise parental anger at the ballot box as a way of halting, indeed
reversing, the trend to harm minimisation.

Her message, which she carried to smaller Australian cities and towns
during a three-week tour, is emerging as the common message of the
reinvigorated anti-reform warriors.

Parents are the key: cultivating their fear of drugs, their fears for their
children, their insistence that governments pass all laws necessary to
"halt" the epidemic of drugs.

Attending the talkfest were delegates from the alliances of church and
community groups opposing Bracks's plans for injecting rooms in Melbourne
suburbs. These included Baptist layman Peter Stokes, chairman of the new
Community Coalition for a Drug-Free Society which brings together the
Australian Family Association, the Festival of Light, the Victorian branch
of the RSL, Women's Christian Temperance Movement and the Mormons.

Deeply impressed by the Macquarie Street proceedings was Craig Osborne, an
Independent member of the ACT Assembly. Indeed, it was here that he saw the
light and decided to oppose Canberra's safe injecting rooms.

"Most members will be aware that I recently attended a week of a drug
summit in Sydney," he told the Assembly. "Much of the week was spent on
taking a rational look at the successful drug strategy of Sweden, the
strategy based on harm prevention not the fallacy of harm minimisation that
we seem to be content to blindly follow.

"I found this conference most enlightening and I cannot help but despair at
the rapid enthusiasm with which Mr Moore pursues his drug agenda."
Osborne's was the crucial vote that killed the ACT legislation.

Moore sees Lindholm's use of unscientific, unsourced statements of "fact"
as a hallmark of the backlash. "It is always right to question whatever
program a government has in place. But one would expect this to be
questioned on scientific and on epidemiological evidence.

"These people make assertions about the efficacy of needle exchange and
other harm-minimisation approaches, claiming they all condone drug use.
There is no evidence for that. But there is huge evidence about the
protection of the community from the spread of disease. They either ignore
this evidence or twist it for their own ends."

Another quiet observer at the summit - listening, watching and chatting
with speakers during coffee breaks in the foyer of the NSW Parliamentary
Theatrette - was John Perrin, the Prime Minister's social policy adviser.

An influential, conservative voice on the PM's personal staff, Perrin last
year told the Australian National Council on Drugs (ANCD) that the Federal
Government would neither countenance a heroin trial in the ACT nor be
interested in receiving contrary advice - despite most of the council's 15
members favouring the option.

This turn of events left the Health Minister, Dr Michael Wooldridge,
dangling in the breeze. He had signed off on the proposed heroin trial in
the ACT in 1997 after mustering the support of all the States. At the same
time, the silencing of the ANCD left its chairman, Brian Watters, free to
pursue a personal campaign against safe injecting rooms.

The hostility between the Prime Minister's office and public health
officials over drugs is now so intense that it is understood in health
circles that Howard's office recently reworked material in a kit designed
to teach small organisations how to set up anti-drug projects.

The "Community Partnerships Kit" was designed for the Health Department by
the Melbourne drug and alcohol body Turning Point.

It emerged from the mill with every reference to harm minimisation excised.
Even commonplace explanations of long-standing drug policy are scored
through wherever they touch on harm minimisation.

The Herald understands negotiations on the final form of the kit have
softened some of these changes.

Meanwhile, the showpiece of the Prime Minister's "Tough on Drugs" strategy,
a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign aimed at teaching parents to
talk to their kids about drugs, has been mothballed.

Again, the problem lies in the tension between the professional and
scientific advice Howard is receiving and the hard, political line he wants
to pursue.

The campaign has been postponed to October at the earliest. The ACT's plans
for a safe injecting room are on hold for at least 18 months. The final
go-ahead for the Sydney safe injecting room is promised any day - but that
promise is six months old.

Meanwhile in Melbourne, the fate of Bracks's plans is being decided in
suburban skirmishes - and by the Liberal Opposition which has the numbers
to block his legislation in the Upper House.

Experts say that it won't be too long before Australia loses 1,000 lives a
year to heroin.