OUR COURAGE TO KEEP UP THE DRUGS BATTLE IS BEING SAPPED

Our war against drugs is not lost. But our courage to fight it is
being sabotaged.

Look at the bottom left of this page, where we report the number of
heroin deaths.

When we first published that figure, on February 23 last year, we told
you 62 people had died already in 1999.

That shocking news electrified the debate over what to do about rising
drug use.

There was, rightly, an air of crisis, and when Labor won office it
appointed a panel of drug advisers led by Professor David Penington.

The panel recently predicted the death toll would race from. 359 last
year to nearly 500 by 2005. It pooh-poohed tougher law enforcement,
and called for "some real changes in the way we handle this issue".
Like introduce five injecting rooms.

But let’s not panic just yet.

As I said, on February 23 last year. the death toll stood at
62.

Yesterday, exactly one year later, the death toll for this year
reached just 37. Still tragic, but around half that of a year ago.

Yes, this may be a statistical blip, and the figures — while last
updated by the Coroner on Tuesday — are a day old.

But there has been a fall, even though the Bracks and Kennett
governments have done little extra to save addicts. It is almost as if
they wanted the old-fashioned ways to fail.

Victoria still has such a huge shortage of treatmeat centres that a
judge this month had to send a 20-year-old woman to South Australia
for help.

Addicts often wait weeks for treatment. If the Bracks Government gets
its way on shooting galleries, by July it will be easier for an addict
to get help to shoot up than to give up.

Or take street policing. Switzerland cut deaths among its addicts
largely by closing down parks where drug dealing had been tolerated.

But here our dealers still parade along the streets of Footscray and
Springvale. A war on drugs? Forget it.

Another example: Customs searches just one in 1000 shipping
containers, says the Penington panel. But US Customs searches up to 30
per 1000. Shouldn’t we try the obvious things first - more drug
treatment places, more street policing, more Customs searches, more
diversion programs for drug offenders and tougher penalties--before
we give in to injecting rooms?

Forget it, even though that works in Sweden. We’re being softened up
for a pro-addict policy, and facts don’t seem to count. So we’re
promised "safe injecting rooms", which are in fact not safe — for anyone.

So we pay for needle "exchanges", which don’t insist on exchanging
needles at all.

So were told we must keep handing out 4.1 million needles a year to
stop addicts getting hepatitis C - yet learn at least half of them get
the disease from shared needles anyway. Needles we pay for.

Then we’re told by the Melbourne Inner City Needle and Syringe Program
that "99 per cent of drug users" get rid of their needles
"responsibly" - only to hear that Melbourne City Council alone finds
35,000 of them in its gutters, and Port Phillip Council has so many on
its beaches that it warns us to get hepatitis B shots.

On it goes. We’re told by the Penlngton panel that injecting rooms are
so good that Frankfurt’s death toll plummeted from 1991. But we find
in fact that Frankfurt’s first injecting room didn't open until years
later, in December 1994.

Never mind. What is proof when we’re on a mission to change
society?

And, boy, aren’t the urgers keen for us to see things from the
addicts’ point of view?

So when Police Minister Andre Haermeyer hears drug use is rife in
prison, he doesn’t demand better security and drug-free jails. Hell,
not he decides to let prisoners get stoned on methadone instead.

Then the director of the Adolescent Forensic Health Service says she
already gives methadone to teenage "clients" of the justice system.
She just wishes prisoners could get free heroin. too, because it's a
"rights issue".

For 15 years we’ve seen this cave-in to what is known as "harm
minimisation" policies. And we’ve drowned in drugs.

Of course, there are many reasons for our crisis, starting with the
abandoning of many young Australians by parents.

But how doubly despicable authority must seem to these youths, when it
is so timid against law-breakers, so eager to please addicts, so
exhausted with standing on principle. so loose with the facts.