PARTIES TEST OUT JOINT DRUGS PLAN

LABOR'S drug spokesman Alan Carpenter and Police Minister Kevin Prince
offered yesterday to produce a bipartisan approach to the drug debate
if they could reach agreement on policies.

Mr Carpenter wrote to Mr Prince, who has assumed responsibility for
drug issues from Rhonda Parker, suggesting the Opposition and the
Government take a bipartisan approach to the issue.

But Mr Carpenter said this should be achieved by the Government
accepting Labor's call for a drug summit, decriminalisation of
cannabis, and an inquiry into injecting rooms and heroin trials.

"We think ours is basically already an apolitical position," said Mr
Carpenter, who has admitted using cannabis, most recently on a holiday
to Italy in 1986.

"The Government is being hamstrung by political imperatives rather
than good policy-making," he said.

"It would be of great satisfaction to everybody if they could remove
those impediments and come on board the same sort of policy positions
that have been advocated by people like (drugs researcher David)
Penington, and which other governments are taking up."

Mr Prince welcomed Mr Carpenter's call for a bipartisan approach, but
suspected the offer was less than genuine.

He said the Government's policies had been developed over four years,
and that the results had been beneficial.

"If he wants to come on board, then fine," Mr Prince
said.

"But what he said in his press release is (we should support) a drug
summit, heroin trials, safe injecting rooms and so on.

"Sorry, they are things he has been trotting out for the past few
years, and it is not policy at all."

Mr Prince, who says he has never smoked cannabis, predicted there
would be little change to the drug policies established by Mrs Parker.

Mr Carpenter and Mrs Parker regularly antagonised each other on their
opposing drug policies, which both claimed were based on ideology.

But after her resignation from cabinet on Wednesday, Mrs Parker
maintained that her policies had been based on thorough and open
examination of the issues and not on ideology.

This included her opposition to heroin trials and safe injecting
rooms.

"This has resulted in a genuinely held conviction that introducing
these initiatives would not be in the best interests of Western
Australia," Mrs Parker said.