HIGH TIDE IN THE DRUGS DEBATE

JUST in case anyone in the wider Victorian community had failed to
notice the extent of this state's heroin problem, the weekend incident
in which ironman competitor Jonathan Crowe pricked his foot on Elwood
beach served to remind us all of how prevalent the drug horror really
is.

Elwood is a suburban beach strip, a place for families, for innocent
fun. On the weekend it was to have been the site of a trouble-free
carnival of beach and water sports. Now, in what can only be seen as
an embarrassment for Melbourne, it appears that the carnival is
unlikely to return - all because one of the city's premier beach spots
is unsafe.

There is debate about whether the syringes that were found on the
beach were left there by drug users or were washed up on to the area
from stormwater drains.

Whatever the explanation, it is clear that heroin use and its
potentially lethal after-effects are now reaching ever deeper into our
society.

Just how omnipresent does the heroin scourge have to become before we
as a society decide to be bold in our responses? The longer we apply
the general tactic of prohibition and punishment - a variation of the
"Just Say No" mentality that has led us to where we are - the more
deeply ingrained the current, unsatisfactory situation will become.

Blue lights, designed to frustrate injecting drug users, in such
places as cinema and fast-food restaurant toilets are now
commonplace.

It is also all too common to see drug users in distress in the city
centre and to read of drug-related bashings and robberies in the
in-brief columns of our local newspapers.

Today's children are growing up in a community where too much care
needs to be taken to account for the possible threats to life and
liberty caused by drug use.

It could well be, as the unfortunate Mr Crowe suggested after he was
pricked by the needle on Saturday, that the incident at Elwood
underscored the need to set up supervised injecting rooms - at least
in a trial.

This is something that The Age believes is worth attempting.

The worst aspect of the present blanket prohibition approach is that
once the use of illegal drugs becomes too widespread for police and
the courts to deal with effectively, as it has now, the community
finds itself tolerating the drug problem anyway.

One possibility is that if supervised injecting rooms were tried in a
limited way, this breakthrough might lead to other, creative treatments.

Politicians, lobbyists and churchmen who want to retain the present
hard-line anti-drug stance to the exclusion of other possible
responses cannot produce evidence that their approach is reducing drug
use.

The evidence in fact, lying there in the sand of Elwood beach, seems
to be in the other direction.