LESS A WAR ON DRUGS THAN ONE ON HARM REDUCTION

No-one would argue that a vehicle promising to foster reasoned debate
on a vexed and complex issue such as drug law reform and drug
rehabilitation should not be supported - and applauded.

The laudable objective of Drug Summit 2000 was to provide a further
new forum for the exchange of ideas and research that some suggest did
not get a full airing at last year's State Government-sponsored Drug
Summit.

Certainly, the agenda and list of speakers bode well for delegates
interested in hearing first-hand the experience of other nations - and
individuals - in the battle against the burgeoning drugs scourge.

But yesterday, it became more and more clear that unlike the summit
last year, which really did allow for full and frank debate on drug
law and rehabilitation philosophy, this event has a rather different
objective.

Indeed, not only does it begin from a fixed viewpoint - that
harm-minimisation approaches should not be tolerated by policy-makers
and government - but it has a clear, rigid goal in sight: to overturn
the State Government's 18-month trial of a medically supervised
injecting room.

The truth is - and the media must also take responsibility for this -
that the most radical Drug Summit experiment, the heroin injecting
room, is the one that has received the most publicity and scrutiny.

But it is one of 400 recommendations of which the great majority, if
not all, barring the injecting room, relate to drug prevention and
rehabilitation - exactly what this conference is supposed to be about.

The speech of the Swedish speaker, Ms Malou Lindholm, was a case in
point, highlighting the current preoccupation with injecting rooms. Ms
Lindholm provided a well articulated case for Sweden's gradual move
over the past 30 years from a so-called liberal approach to drug laws
and treatment to a policy push for a "drug-free" society based on
tough measures such as random drug testing of individuals on suspicion
of use and compulsory rehabilitation.

She provided an impressive array of statistics, including the vastly
reduced incidence of drug use among the young - just 3 per cent of
Swedish 15 to 16-year-olds admit to having tried drugs (as against
more than 40 per cent in Australia).

At the end of her speech, however, she came to the point. Holding a
bagful of syringes, swabs and spoons triumphantly aloft for the TV
cameras, she said they were given to her "free" at a needle exchange
in Kings Cross. A terrible message to Australia's young, she said, a
message that using drugs is "normal".

"You must say no to heroin injecting room ... What next, the State
becomes a heroin dealer?"

But then Ms Lindholm was faced with the latest statistics on the
Swedish experience. The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug
Addiction records 250 heroin deaths in Sweden in 1996 among a
population of 8.8 million compared with 61 deaths among 15.6 million
in the Netherlands, which adopts a harm-minimisation approach
including injecting rooms.

Ms Lindholm politely but firmly gave short shrift to that debate.