DRUG-ACCIDENT LINK IS FAR FROM PROVED

In her article of June 23, Jan Wade quoted some of the Macfarlane Burnet
Centre's research on illicit drug use and driving to support her argument
that tougher law enforcement is needed to combat drug problems. It is true
that many of the heroin users we interviewed drove to buy their drugs, and
some routinely consumed heroin before driving away. Unfortunately, Mrs
Wade ignored our less convenient findings, including (from a review of the
scientitic literature) that the links between illicit drug use and
increased road accident risk are far from clear-cut. Some of the best
local research has been conducted by Professor Olaf Drummer (Victorian
Insitute of Forensic Medicine), who found that opiate users were not
significantly more likely to be culpable in fatal accidents than non-users
(unless they had also recently consumed alcohol). For cannabis users the
likelihood of culpability was actually slightly lower than for drug-free
drivers, but not significantly so.

Mrs Wade also neglected our finding that the reason many heroin users
consume drugs before driving rather afterwards is because they perceive the
risk of being apprehended in possession of drugs to outweigh risks
associated with drug use, and that drug-driving is of little concern to
most users because they are already acting outside the law by using
prohibited drugs. This is another example of drug prohibition policies
having an unintended adverse effect. Mrs Wade's call for increased law
enfocement flies in the face of evidence from the home of drug prohibition
and "the war against drugs" - the United States - where HIV is rampant
among drug injectors, where the prison population is huge and increasing
rapidly, where seizure and forfeiture laws have generated massive
corruption and eroded civil liberties, and where drug problems are worse on
almost every criterion than in Australia.

Dr Campbell Aitken, Macfarlane Burnet Centre for Medical Research,
Fairfield, Vic