SOCIAL CHAOS A BIG PERIL FOR ADDICTS

Australia risks cultivating industries in heroin harm reduction with vested
interests in maintaining the status quo rather than tackling the social
causes of illicit drug use, a medical expert said yesterday.

Dr Nick Crofts, the director of the Centre for Harm Reduction at the
Macfarlane Burnet Centre for Medical Research, said supervised injecting
rooms, needle exchange programs, and heroin trials were potential
"Band-Aids", when the real danger to addicts was coming from the chaotic
social setting users lived in.

"Band-Aids are good; they aid healing. But if we don't stop the process
causing the wounds, we'll build bigger and bigger industries supplying
Band-Aids, and eventually the Band-Aid manufacturers will become one of the
vested interests opposing fundamental change to reduce the need for them,"
he said.

"Needle and syringe exchange first, then heroin trials, now safe injecting
facilities - these become battlegrounds around which the heroin drug debate
rages. They are all important aspects of harm reduction ... but only small
parts of much wider issues."

Dr Crofts, speaking at an Australian Drug Foundation seminar, said the
priority should be to "re-admit drug users to the human race" by tackling
underlying social, economic and political inequities. He joined
international drug experts at the conference in saying that prohibition had
proved an abject failure. Prohibition prevented regulating the drug trade,
he said, and perpetuated a demonised image of the drug addict.

"They need humane and diverse drug treatment facilities. Above all they need
the respect owing to them as human beings ... They need primary health care,
they need employment, education and training, they need acceptance as human
beings," Dr Crofts said.

He said the development of needle exchange programs had been a huge triumph
in public health and contained the spread of HIV in Australia. But it had
now become entrenched and was proving an impediment to progress in
deregulating the supply of needles and syringes so that they were available,
with the appropriate safeguards and guidelines, on retail shelves at
reasonable prices, he said.

Similarly, harm reduction measures had the potential to distract attention
from a "higher level" of drug policy reform. "If safe injecting rooms were
to work, and overdose deaths decline, and street scenes disappear, much of
the visible part of the problem will go away and the pressure to consider
fundamental reform of bad policy will be weakened."