HEED HEROIN'S HARSH LESSON - THE WAR ON DRUGS HAS FAILED

ACCORDING to the former pop star Mr Normie Rowe, the State Government's
drugs-policy adviser Dr David Penington has hijacked public debate about
heroin. By this Mr Rowe means that the influence of Dr Penington, who heads
a committee that will report to the Government on the establishment of five
supervised injection rooms in metropolitan Melbourne, has tipped the balance
away from policies emphasising law enforcement and towards policies
emphasising harm minimisation. Mr Rowe is among the increasing number of
Australian parents who have known the anguish of seeing a child become a
heroin addict.

Comments arising from such memories cannot lightly be gainsaid, but the
truth is that Mr Rowe is misinformed - about existing policies, about the
actual effect of those policies, and about Dr Penington's contribution to
the drugs debate.

Australia's governments, state and Commonwealth, have been officially
committed to harm-minimisation policies for 15 years.

Yet, despite that commitment, most of the money governments actually spend
on the drug problem is still devoted to law enforcement. And what Dr
Penington and others who think as he does have pointed out is that the
emphasis on law enforcement has demonstrably failed.

It has failed to stop plentiful and cheap supplies of heroin reaching the
streets of Melbourne and other Australian cities, and it has failed to stop
the increase in the number of deaths caused by heroin use. In Australia, the
number of overdose deaths doubled between 1991 and 1997, and in Victoria
alone it doubled between 1997 and 1999. At the same time, the average age of
first-time users fell, from 26 to 16. The suffering and despair afflicting
those addicted to the drug and their families and friends, and the failures
of existing policy, were documented in a special investigative series The
Age published last week.

Mr Rowe and the coalition of conservative family and church groups on whose
behalf he was speaking share the attitude of the Prime Minister, Mr John
Howard, to heroin trials and supervised injection rooms.

They believe that if the law sanctions these things, it will send young
people the message that drug use is a good thing.

This has not been the experience of countries such as Switzerland and the
Netherlands, which have actually adopted such strategies. In both places,
drug-related deaths and drug-related crime have dropped. The Victorian
Government has rightly chosen to see whether supervised injection rooms
might work here too. The alternative is to stick with the so-called "war on
drugs", which a member of the Penington committee, Mr Bernie Geary of Jesuit
Social Services, has chillingly but accurately described as "... a war
against drug users, that is, a war against our children.

That's an immoral war, and it has been lost."